install MS Office on clusters

[geofft]

It would be really cool if we could use one of our site licenses for MS Office (e.g., the one that WIN.MIT.EDU clusters use, or the MS Campus Agreement) to cover cluster machines and run MS Office via Wine, since there are differences in rendering, advanced features, etc. between MS Office and OpenOffice?.org.

jdreed believes that one of these licenses could actually cover clusters and said he'd talk with the person who does MS licensing; meanwhile, we should test that Office actually runs acceptably under Wine.

[geofft]

jdreed said the licensing thing will work out for MIT-owned machines, so we need to restrict this to clusters (and maybe other machines on request) somehow.

I installed wine1.2 from Karmic's repositories on Jaunty, and ran setup.exe from the volume license Office 2007 .zip file (without using the MIT config, which causes it not to prompt or pop up a GUI), and Office installed properly in ~/.wine. MS Office Word appears to work and have all the interesting fonts and print, which is the primary use case, so targeting this for Karmic is reasonable. MS Office Outlook  fails miserably.

We're going to want to install this outside of ~/.wine so we can package it (or put it in a locker or something); I bet this is easy.

[geofft]

There's a downloadable beta of Office 2010, apparently free:
 http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/outlook/default.aspx
I wonder if its Outlook is more or less likely to work.

[jdreed]

This was really only useful for Outlook. And with the new VM project may be moot anyway.

[jdreed]

Office is free for everyone now.