OpenOffice beta versus Microsoft Office

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May 062005
 

Microsoft beware! The new beta of OpenOffice has features to be a Microsoft Office killer. It opens and saves Microsoft Office documents flawlessly. It has the option to export to PDF, without a need to buy extra software. It includes an Access-like database product BASE (Access is only available in bigger Office versions, or as a standalone product). Most of all: OpenOffice is free.
True, it lacks a good email program like Outlook, but if you can’t live without it, buy it seperately for about $110. Free OpenOffice + $110 <<< MS Office Standard!

Click on the title for a review of the new beta.

As a sidenote, OASIS (an organisation defining/approving e-business standards) has approved the OpenDocument format, a minor extension of the format OpenOffice 2.0 beta uses. The OpenDocument format will save you from the vendor lock-in, since you can switch Office applications without losing your documents.

 Posted by at 22:36

E-Sync creates custom Outlook fields

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May 062005
 

To be able to quickly recognize if an appointment from the ERP-software was already synchronised to Outlook, E-Sync had to be able to recognize the appointments already in Outlook. Since all fields I filled until now are standard-fields that anyone can fill or change in Outlook, I needed custom-fields. For C#, this is not a very well documented area, like more Office development stuff. Lot’s of code reference and samples in VBA or VB, if you’re lucky VB.NET, but C# is scarce. I’m not sure why this is, C# has been around long enough now.

Anyways, E-Sync now recognizes the appointments it made in Outlook by the same unique number that is used in the ERP-software. And since there is no default-form in Outlook showing custom-fields, the user can’t see or change it.

I’ll have to talk to the manufacturer of the ERP-software first, but I guess this is the basis for 2-way synchronisation. And since the user can’t see/change the custom-field, the appointment has to be created in the ERP-software.

 Posted by at 22:27