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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.
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.