OpenOffice

One of the usual pains when creating your own software is to keep up with the documentation of it. It becomes such a major hassle, because virtually no office suite offers an integrated interface with the development platform you are using, so you eventually end up using your IDE for program development and your usual wordprocessor for the documentation, keeping files at different locations and sooner or later loosing out on synchronicity between your documentation and the actual progress of your development.

If your IDE is Eclipse though, you can now utilise the Office Integration Editor Plugin, and as from that day onward use the functionality of a full blown wordprocessor ("Write" from OpenOffice) to keep your documentation up to date.

Since you now keep your documentation within the development tree of your application, updating your CVS or Subversion repository with new versions of your documentation becomes a breeze - and that in turn allows you as well as your entire development staff to ensure the highest level of quality regarding your documentation too.

Many business applications these days invariably integrate their reporting functions solely with MS-Office. That in turn usually binds people using these kinds of applications to that specific office package too - despite the fact that there's actually nothing that would keep the developers from also providing a link to OpenOffice too, but they simply haven't catched on yet.

So what do you do, if you want to wipe MS-Office from your disk and still be able to use the "Office integration" functions of your (usually: closed source) business applications? Well, meet AutomateIT!, a tool that essentially replaces the OLE/COM objects found in MS-Office installations with similar working OpenOffice equivalents.

In essence that now allows you to click the "Export to Excel" buttons in your financial software - and instead of Mirosoft Excel popping up with the export result, you now have OpenOffice Calc pop up with the same data - one could only wish that the world would always be that simple.

Built by ApriorIT, a Ukranian company, this tool is still so new, it's only considered to be "alpha software", yet it already provides a good example of how you can indeed replace yet another Microsoft product with an open source equivalent without having to switch operating systems just yet - and thus allowing you to have a "smoother" transition from Windows to Linux one of these day.