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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."
while your at it, you ought to give Mandrake Linux a shot. I think that's the only other PPC Distro you haven't tried. I've been very please with Mandrake over here in X86 land.
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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
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.
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.