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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?
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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.
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)
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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.
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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.