The Office 2007 demo and Linux

Jun. 30, 2006

Have you wondered what's really behind Microsoft's web-based Office 2007 demo beta? I did, and what I found was more than a little interesting.

First, Microsoft is not hosting the demo. Oh, it may look like that, with all those Microsoft trademarks, links and logos on the pages, but the demo URL tells all: www.runaware.com.

Runaware Inc. is a Swedish company with offices in North America. It makes its money as a leading ESP (evaluation service provider). In short, it enables companies to offer demonstrations of their programs for prospective customers.

Runaware is not an ASP (application service provider), you can't hire them to host your applications; this company is all about product marketing.

To provide this service, Runaware uses, get this, Linux and Apache in its American-based Web site and an elderly copy of Tru64 Unix and Apache in its Swedish location.

Ah, the irony.

The demo application servers, however, run on Citrix Presentation Server 4, aka MetaFrame, on Windows Server 2003.

If you try to run the demo on your system, you'll find that the Web entry page insists that you need to be running Windows 2000, 2003, or XP and Internet Explorer 5.5 or later. But, do you really need to be doing that?

That's not a Presentation Manager requirement. With it, you can run any demo -- or application, for that matter -- on any system with a modern browser and Java. Citrix specifically mentions Mac OS and Linux as being supported.

In fact, Citrix has enabled Linux and Mac users to run Windows applications remotely for years, now, as a RAS (Remote Application Service). All you need to do is to download the ICA Client.

In fact, if you poke around the Runaware site, you'll find that you can run a demo version of Office 2003 using Firefox and Linux. I know, because I just did it using the SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 beta and Firefox 1.504.

Could it be that Microsoft doesn't want you to know that, if you really wanted Office 2007, you could do it from a Linux desktop and Firefox instead of having to buy into an all Microsoft solution?

It looks like that to me.

Oh, did I mention that OpenOffice.org has just come out with a new version that's still free for Windows and Linux? OpenOffice.org 2.03 boasts better performance, some security fixes, and improved Microsoft Office file format compatibility.

Ah, and look at this. Microsoft has just announced that, surprise, it won't be able to meet the October 2006 business-availability target for Office 2007? Now, Office 2007 won't be appearing until sometime early in 2007.

You can wait for Microsoft to get its act together if you like. Me? I've got work to do, and I've got Linux and free, open-source tools available today to do it with.


-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols