Notices

MS Office Mobile might not interest a lot of the long-term Maemo users here, but it is the only significant reason why anybody would buy a Windows Mobile device instead.

I use Outlook and OneNote everyday - enough to be tempted by a otherwise crappy WM phone. Having full support on Maemo would be excellent. Word and Excel would also be very nice.

I see that there are plans for MS Office Mobile on Symbian.

http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2009/0...ng-to-symbian/

I was wondering if anybody had any further news about this? Is it likely that this would extend to Maemo anytime soon?

Full Outlook/Exchange support would be the thing that I want most on the N900, and I am sure that there would be thousands of others that would want this too.

* There are going to be web based versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote 2010, but I am not sure how well they will work on the N900 without Silverlight and whatever else they would need. There is also no Outlook 2010 web version planned.

(Old news.)

Maemo 6 will use Qt and WRT (Web RunTime) as UI toolkits. KOffice utilizes Qt, is a mature product, is currently being ported to Maemo, and has MS Office document support as well as OpenOffice.org document support. This application is free as in speech ans free as in beer, and supports open standards.

Maemo 5 has Documents To Go read-only support by default with write support license available for a fee.

Hence, I question the need for MS Office Mobile for Maemo.

Well I did not mean to say that it was recent news, but I had only just read about it. Also, I said that it is mainly Outlook/Exchange (also OneNote) functions that I was most interested in. Neither of which are catered for by those programs.

I am surprised that MS Office Mobile is coming to Symbian, as surely that would kill any reason to use Windows Mobile for corporate users.

You question the need for MS Office Mobile for Maemo, and I would agree with you to a degree, but there the big missing thing is decent Outlook/Exchange support, which most of the enterprise world use. It would give Maemo a lot of strength to compete with Blackberry as well.

There is also nothing quite like OneNote (Evernote is good, but is not suitable for my use) but that is not quite as important as Outlook.

I'd be happy to consider any available alternatives, but there is no open software to compare to Outlook.

(The reason I say this is old news is a general statement not directed towards TS. It indicates this topic has been discussed before. Keywords: Exchange, Outlook, MS Office)

Which Outlook features do you require?

Which features of OneNote do you require?

Nokia N900 can sync with Outlook, and Exchange support is provided via ActiveSync protocol version 2.5. Nokia N900 also has SyncML support to synchronize with applications which tend to babble an open standard.

I've never used the WinMo version, TBH, but what I liked a lot on the desktop version is being able to import PDFs and then click anywhere on their pages and add notes... that would be _great_ to have on the N900.

You can already do that with Xournal.

I'm sold. Where do I get that?


-edit- OK, found it in the OS2008 downloads, but will it run on Maemo5 without trouble?

yes

http://maemo.org/packages/view/xournal/

Now that Nokia started porting KOffice over, are there any efforts being made to port Korganizer???
May be this guy is doing something...

This was a strategic choise made by Microsoft. They know that WinMo is dropping rapidly in market share, and they absolutely need to keep the MS Office format dominant. That's why they chose Symbian with its great market share, which at the same time isn't a threat for Windows (unlike Maemo/Linux, which can be considered as that, sort of), nor it is owned by their main competitors (unlike Android and Iphone). The remaining alternatives simply have too small market shares to even bother Microsoft.