I’ve been looking for an alternative to Microsoft Publisher since the dawn of time…  Ok not quite but I’ve often thought that if an alternative existed the school could drop the $7000 per year cost of maintaining Microsoft Office.  The Macs could run Neo Office and the PCs could run OpenOffice.  Or both could run OpenOffice.

The two main advantages are cost and familiarity.  The cost is, of course, free.  Being that OpenOffice is cross platform is a big advantage because the interface is identical no matter if it’s Windows or Linux or Mac.  Currently we have Microsoft Office 2007 on the Windows computers and Microsoft Office 2008 on the Macs.  While MS claims them to be the same, they are not.  The interface is very different and MS doesn’t offer Publisher on the Mac side.

Scribus- alternative to MS Publisher?

The biggest holdup has been publisher because so many teachers use it to create newsletters to send home.  I’ve been waiting for a good alternative to present itself and while OpenOffice doesn’t yet have a clear cut choice it appears that another open source package, Scribus, might do the trick.  At least during my five minute trial and test of features it appears to work very much the same.  It doesn’t have some of the polish and word wrap appears to be funky but it does do many of the things the teachers want and think they need.

This discovery will weigh heavy on my mind as I try to investigate the possibility of eliminating MS Office from the school’s standard software and by doing so save over $6000 per year!

Popularity: 25% [?]

Windows 7 Beta 1 has shown up on the Internet on various download sites and peer-to-peer sharing location and many are beginning to suspect that this “mostly complete” beta of the next latest and greatest version of Windows was leaked by Microsoft themselves!  And this makes sense.  After all there are problems, features, and issues that never show up in beta releases until released and subjected to the wide variety of hardware and software combinations.

I was able to get my hands on a version of the Windows 7 Ultimate beta.  It’s running as a virtual machine on my Mac and I must say that with what little testing I have done it does appear to be faster than Vista which was one of the main complaints.  Even with only 512 mb of ram allocated it runs fairly well and in some cases better than my copy of Windows XP Pro running with 512 mb ram.  Disk activity is an issue and certainly affects performance expecially on my Macbook with only a 5400 rpm drive.  I am almost certain at this point that I’m going to buy and install a 7200 rpm 320 gb drive for the Macbook but that is another story.  This may be a biased report because Windows Glass (Aero) is not supported under VMWare fusion 1.1 officially and even though I’m running 2.0 (the latest version) it still doesn’t work. more…

Popularity: 31% [?]