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Concerns when Switching Offices to Linux and StarOffice?
Reezle asks: "I am a reluctant Microsoft Engineer who has a few customers sitting on the fence whether to go the XP route, or bite the bullet and switch an entire office over to Linux. I would love to assist them, and educate myself at the same time, but am unsure of the limitations of file type interoperability between MS Office, and Linux programs (Star Office is the only one I'm familiar with). I assume anything they create could be saved in formats that their business partners will be able to open (i.e. RTF), but what happens when they receive attachments encoded with Office 2000 or XP (ie DOC, XLS, PUB, etc)? I'd love to encourage them to make the switch, but would hate to see them unexpectedly cut off from the people they need to communicate with. Any help/advice would be appreciated."
What you need to complete the ability to switch is a web-based way to convert MS documents. This way you can provide a few linux machines for people to use and see others use and get over the fear; documents can be submitted to a server through web page, returned as html or RTF or whatever depending on what you want to do with it. All those MS tools provide "save as . . ." functions in various formats.
If you email an MS document to yourself at a Yahoo email address, you can go to the Yahoo web interface and veiw the document as html. For a small home office this is acceptable; for a bigger company, you search around in yahoo's site you can find a link to the company that provides the server that does that MStrash-to-html conversion.
But what we really need (and have been needing for a while) is a set of CGI and visual basic scripts that will allow a person to install apache on a windows2k or XP or whatever flavor of the week with the cygwin stuff, and provide a small web page that will take submitted documents, load them into the appropriate MS tool and save them as the appropriate format, and return them to the user. You can already buy this for a price, but a GPLd project along these lines would break a lot of dependancies on MS. I hate MS too much to even acquire a copy of the OS and Office and learn VB to start such a project.
the reason this is even an issue is that you're currently locked into MS tools. Along that line, the longer you wait to make the switch the harder it will become.
Take the plunge, to move to XP and THEN try to get out will be even harder. In a world without fences, who needs Gates?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
As much as Adobe is hated by some people and watched with suspicion by others, there are many free tools to make PDFs on linux, and I think everyone agrees they are the most supported file format for complex documents (and more control than HTML). And of course, you could show them that free tools give them just as much as the much more expensive full version of Acrobat.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
The problem is that you are never dealing with a set of Word docs and templates. There will be excel spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations. There will be custom macros, and Word-Basic extentions. Documents will be linked and embedded in each other.
In short, most microsoft offices are going to stay that way because of the interdependancies on various proprietory products and protocols.
Your best bet for getting a Linux/StarOffice solution in place is if there is nothing there already. If microsoft has got a company hooked on their corporate crack cocaine, there is very little you can do to wean them off it.
Sad to say, but true.
If it's a relatively small office, switch over most of the boxes to Linux, and keep one or two to use as file conversion boxes. If something comes in that Star Office can't handle, use the WinXP box to convert the the file to something readable.
I'm not sure how much different this is than an office that doesn't upgrade to the newest and greatest Office is though. Before we switched to a Mac/Linux office, we had kept to Windows & Office 95 up to 1999. Occasionaly we sent documents back to suppliers requesting that they send us something we could read because the format was for Office 98, and Office 95 would choke on it.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I've been toying with the idea of converting my offices over to Linux for quite a while. They're all using iMacs of various vintages and I put every distro I could find on test boxes to see if I could make it work. YellowDog is best, SuSE second and LinuxPPC is a nightmare. I don't think that my users would stand for sending all their attachments through a processing server so it's not an option. Star Office, AbiWord, Gnumeric are the best bet but there need to be some serious work on the translations from formating from the Evil Empire. OSX seems appealing due to it's BSD underpinnings. Although OSX is wonderful and would solve my problems, the cost of upgrading is prohibitive. YellowDog 2.0 with Ximian Gnome is real nice and is my current candidate. I've just gotten YellowDog 2.1 and put it on a test machine, it's nice at first glance but I need to put it through its' paces.
Aslong as all the documents are just plain text / formatting / pictures / charts etc and dont have anythigng to rough like VB script (macros) or ole objects - then you should be fine..
But to be honest, I'd definatly hold off until star office 6.0 (few months) - 5.2 is just way to bloat. Although we use it at work, I dont like it much. Or, if you could get it all working fine, you could go for open office.
For other desktop applicatoins I think that kde offers a very good suite - kmail, konq, etc are all very good imho. (And import outlook email folders)
Cheers
craz
stuff
If you are using MS products and you need to hire a temp, Say somone to create a bunch of Powerpoint slides then it is rather easy to find somone call a temp agency and they will send someone over. On the other hand if you are using something that is not that common you might not be able to get someone to fill in or handle a short term need when you have one. It may still be something you want to do. But you should keep this in mind.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Lots of great comments, but perhaps I mistated the original problem.
.doc .xls etc to partner companies. (hundreds of partners)
Imagine if you will a company that "IN THE COURSE OF THEIR BUSINESS" has to send
From what I've read, SO is not going to be able to do it.
About the closest solution would be a translation service for the docs as they enter/leave the company mail server, but I think this is one of the complexities they were trying to get rid of.
Translating both incoming and outgoing files realtime, without corrupting them... wonder what such a translation service would do when it was fed a macro virus in a Word doc?
Guess I'll hold my breath for OS6, and ask them to do the same, unless there is a better idea?
(I loved the reference to OS5x being half-baked. To listen to some people out there, it's a direct replacement to Office'97, and bug-free to boot. Nice to hear some of the flip-side.)
Even though printer support seems to be gaining momentum, it's still not as good as printing in a M$ Windows environment. I would think in an office environment this would be more of a concern than to a home user. This is the only thing that is keeping me from switching over entirely, I would in the process be turning my two printers into paperweights. Check www.linuxprinting.org for compatible printers, and stay away from win-printers, if I had known mine was a win-printer I never would have bought it in the first place. Live and learn.
Here's the skinny: StarOffice will open essentially any word, Excel and Powerpoint doc you throw at it. However, intricately formatted things (resumes, tightly laid out forms, "word art" drawings, etc.) won't lay out perfectly. Line breaks end up a bit different, graphic placement on presentation slides is sometimes a bit off, and so forth. Nothing terrible, but it does mean that certain heavily formatted things aren't easy to work on simultaneously in both environments. However, this seems to have improved vastly in the SO 6 betas.
Also, SO and MS Office have their own macro environments. SO won't harm MS macros, but it also won't run them. You can, however, get at the macro code and bring it to SO's own VBA clone environment and port the macros reasonably easily. Basically, if you have a lot invested in MS Office macros, switching out will cause some initial pain, and if you rely on running macros sent from outside, life will be rough. This is tru when dealing with any two different office suites.
As for training and usability, SO is picked up very easily by people who have used MS Office. The built-in help isn't nearly as good, and some advanced operations are a bit more tedious, but 90-95% of the time, things are where people expect them to be. And big thick books on it are available from the usual publishers.
SO's mail and calendaring client isn't MAPI-compatible. If an office is running Exchange servers, it's not going to cut it. It is, however a decent IMAP and POP mailer, a good newsreader, and does have good group calendaring of its own. No web interface though as of yet.
We're actually discussing a move from Office 97 to Office XP internally now, but that looks to be so much of a problem we may move to Star Office.
We investiaged alternative to MS Office some time ago, and there are some issues:
-While most free software can open Word Docs with considerable accuracy, the problem becomes embedded OLE objects. Now, Word Docs are written in a bidirectional COM stream (similar in ways to Mac Data Fork/Resource Fork). If you open an XP Document on Office 97, what you get is an RTF-like rendering of the source. No OLE, no red lining (for example), but the text and it's formatting. Same thing with Star Office and MS Office - open an MS Office document under Star and you get an RTF rendering of the source. I have not tried this with Star Office 6, but I did extensive testing with 5.x. Our solution to the OLE problem (since it does creep up on Macs with MS Office as well) was to render each and every incoming Word Document as a PDF via a robot (print to file --> make a postscript --> distill). We have a 99%+ success rate with this.
-One thing you should understand about understand that PDF's are largely untouchable. You either need to open it in Acrobat Exchange to make changes or use another tool (we bought Solvero and Asura which were $40,000 for one copy - excellent tools but expensive).
-Star Office 6 supports XML as the file format. We think this is great because it makes writing import filters for layout software a snap. We're just waiting for it to mature a little before we dive in (we figure Q2 2002 before we take a serious look).
Now, those are the technical issues, which are the easy ones. The hard issue is going to be selling your users on a change to a free office product. A lot of it will depend on how many users you have, what their role is (if they're just saving documents for internal use vs. documents they need to send out to the public vs. documents they need to share with 100 different agencies who've all standardized on Office), what features of MS Office they use, and how much your company is willing to spend. The cost savings alone could make it an easier sell. If they won't take the jump to something free, suggest Word Perfect Office (which is compatible, slick, supported, and not free).
Email me if you wish to discuss this further. Best of luck!
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
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You are really going to have test the waters with your company's staff and management. It is unrealistic to expect any product (open-source or otherwise) is going to be able to read every future proprietary Microsoft file format. If important people are going to view this as a shortcoming of the non-Microsoft product, then don't initiate change if you like your job. I'd just pass a cost analysis and relevant caveats along to management, and wait and see if greed eventually brings about change (i.e. your ass is covered).
...disabling a friend's laptop? For real????? Seriously????
Amazing. Advice to try and transition people to non-MS apps: keep this guy out of the office.
I know this is a bit OT, but I want to know if there are proper spell AND grammar checkers for star office. I actually find the underlining system (for bad grammar and wrong spelling) in MS Office to be very efficient and couldn't live without it.
Is star office good for embedded objects as well (e.g. equations which could be done with MS's equation editor)?
What about the file sharing capabilities of these distros? Or can you use Netware, OpenADS, DCE, or something to avoid the file attachment problem?
It seems like file sharing technologies are more mature than MIME/SMTP file transfers. Most security advisories seem to me to actively discourage all binary attachments. Then you also have the issues of version control, locking, worms, storage space, etc.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I'm fairly certian that there is a SO version for windows. So install that now on all the machines and suggest that people use it. When you buy a new machine for someone who doesn't do heavy duty office work don't buy office for it, just put SO on. See what the users reaction is, if most complain then you know this isn't working, but you haven't lost much.
Don't forget training. Don't even think you can make this switch without giving users trainging. But then you can't make the switch to XP without training either, just a little less.
The unix way takes some getting used to, but I find it grows on you. Don't sell this as a windows replacement though, sell it as the new way.
Keep the latest version of wine around, it is good enough for some purposes and will help ease the transisition.