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Deploying Open Office?
scubacuda asks: "I've mass deployed OpenOffice at work. Of the 40 computers running, ALL are running OpenOffice (only about 5 are running Microsoft Office in addition). I'm quite surprised at how well-received the deployment has been thus far: secretaries seem to be pleased with how well it integrates with Avery labels, it converts to/from Microsoft Office DOC/XLS files, etc. Have any other slashdotters implemented OpenOffice in an enterprise environment? If so, what have been the reactions from users and management?"
Question...
How many users did you deploy to?
Are we talking a 50 person 'enterprise' or are we talking about thousands of users?
I assume Mac OS X -- that would be the simplest. It's the only platform I can think of that you *know* will be compatible with both OpenOffice and Microsoft Word.
Your friendly neighborhood nitpicker
Duh! 40 users. It's right there.
40 PC's hardly constitutes an Enterprise. It would be an entirely different story if you had 5k+ desktop users to install to, support, and make happy.
11*43+456^2
I am manager of a project with 5 staff. Before shoving it down the throat of my people, I wanted to use it myself and see if it's really usable/stable/reliable/compatible....
(I have quite a bit of unix/linux background, detonating kernels and X servers for some 10 years, not your average newbie)
It's Ugly and Slow.
I'm still using because I don't want to shell $$$ to Micro$oft which is rich enough already, but it's unpleasant when it takes 14 seconds to start on a P3-850 w/ 256MB. I more often end up moving the document to a PC with Office, working there, then taking it back, using OO only as an emergency.
Only recently I discovered AbiWord and it was instant love: 3MB installer, small memory footprint, starts in a flash, and it's NICE!!!!
OO is soooo unsexy (and memory-hungry) that I avoid using it whenever possible. Its UI definitely needs some work, not even the scroller on my touchpad works in it (it does in AbiWord and in everything else).
If only there was some usable Excel replacement for the Win32 platform (Yes I'm running Win2K on all office PCs. No Linux, sorry, it's not really ready yet for the desktop.) a la gnumeric, I think OO would disappear rather quickly from my PC.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
for me. All of the office suites today have too many features, most of them useless to me. They come with too many thigns also. I just want a word processor and a Pagemaker/Publisher type program. That's it. I do use OpenOffice, but only because its free and compatible with other things. One good thing I can say about it is that it saved me from Star Office 6.
When SO6 was Beta and free I was using it. I wrote some important documents in it. Then the beta expired and I couldn't read the documents in anything I had. So I got OpenOffice and I was able to read my important files.
Does anyone know about a lite word processor/pagemaker for win2k that has more features than wordpad (i.e: spellcheck, autocomplete, etc) but none of the useless features of other offices (the stuff that makes OpenOffice take forever to start up)??
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
and apart from its slow startup I find it fine.
However I'm only using the wordprocessor part to keep format compatable with other in the department who use MS Word
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
It feels like its aobut where office 97 was. Kinda klunky, not all the functionalty of office 2000/xp, but find it quite useable. The only holdout for me is MsExcel, the only program that Microsoft ever did right(sorta). AS for useability, it works the same as MsOffice for all intents and purposes, and seems to lack all the crap that MS tries to shove down your throat, like bizzarre ways to format and the damned paperclip. I like it, and my issuse between this and Excel may disappear once i learn more of the functions.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Of course, given that "enterprise" is a mostly meaningless buzzword and is overused by vendors trying to hype their products anyway...heck, if he wants to use it to make this sound more exciting, works for me.
May we never see th
I've been using OOo for some time now to do all of my work at the office, and I quite like it. The word compatibility is good, but not perfect. On even relatively simple documents with embedded graphics, headers / footers, or text that has been rotated it has some minor conversion problems, but nothing that is a show-stopper for me.
I am currently working to get the school district I work for to adopt Star Office 6, since it is almost as free for us as OOo is for everyone else, and we get the backing of Sun, should anything go Horribly Horribly Wrong(TM), which makes the administration more comfortable.
My biggest hurdle at this point is the large installed base of Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 users. Anyone know of a win32 program that converts from Wordperfect format to something more usable relatively reliably?
StarOffice works great. I'm using all-linux outside the office.
But, StarOffice isn't quite what you might be looking for...
It's a very small outfit...
Deploying any text-based programs more complex than notepad has an adverse effect on collective self-esteem and inspires feelings of inadequacy and horror in some scenarios.
it's already half loaded. C'mon guys, why do you measure how fast something is based on how fast it starts? do your useage habits consist of launching it, looking at a document for 30 seconds, and then closing it again, or do you use some of it's features? are these features slow? so maybe it's slow to start because it's too polite to use your system resources _all_ the time just in case you want to launch it in 5 seconds.
Sitting Walrus Blog
Before even attempting this in our office of about 60 workers we took a sample of around 50 word documents and tested each for template compatibility, macro safety, embedded object handling, printed output, faxed output, HTML conversion, spelling, preservation of tables, lists, you name it... It passed that OK and we moved on to the next phase, which was testing about 10 **HUGE** excel files for problems between formulas, macros, printed output, charts, etc. etc... the results were acceptable. PowerPoint was not as important but it passed those acceptably as well. In addition to all of these internal tests we had to mail some files to frequent clients and suppliers to make sure we weren't breaking anything with our partners, and apart from one or two glitches everything was a go (not like there are never glitches with "real" office anyway).
So finally we rolled everything out one weekend, uninstalling MS Office in the process.
After three days we were back to re-installing Office 97 everywhere, because we found to our surprise that *nobody* could work without the paper clip.
My office is divided between the savvy Engineering department, which uses Linux and gcc for development and, believe it or not, groff for written stuff, and the Sales department, which used to use MSOffice 97. Due to extensive lobbying by the lead engineer, and some incompatibilities between Office97 and 2000, when the hour came for an upgrade we seized the opportunity to switch sales and management to an OO-based environment.
The results so far are that:
(1) Some unexpected people are going to _need_ MS Office, point-blank. The popular financial package we use only 'exports' data to Excel. Not excel file formats; just Excel (via OLE or COM or whatever they're calling it this week.) Although it has a 'print to CSV' feature (don't ask), it saves the file with some silly Lotus-specific extension that OpenOffice doesn't believe is actually a CSV file. Although renaming should in principle be easy, the people who need to use this data are simply not up to the task of understanding (a) why they need to set their folder options to show all those funny little three-letter thingies at the end of the filename, and (b) why they can't just click the 'Excel' button like they used to. So the people that need to regularly manipulate the data in the financial database at a relatively low level need MSO. Also, upper management simply adores Outlook, so you might have to appease them with the real mccoy. So buy a couple of copies of MSO, just in case.
(2) Many other people won't notice the switch. (Seriously!) Or, at least until they try to open a heavily-formatted word document sent to them from someone outside the company, which leads to point
(3). Always install the freely-downloadable viewers for Office documents, which are available for free on MS' website, and make sure that they map to the MSO filetypes. Really, the Word-document import engine of OO is not yet up to snuff, and the spreadsheet (although very, very close in quality and feel to Excel) barfs in some strange places where Excel is still (perversely) happy. For instance, if you cut and paste a column of cells into a column absolutely referenced by the formulae in those cells, it becomes self-referential and then, in the judgement of both reason and OpenOffice, should display an error. However, Excel will simply display the original contents of the cells before they were copied, and silently ignores the formulae. OO's is obviously the theoretically correct response, but many of the (ahem) generalists in Sales have a hard time understanding what, precisely, they're copying, and Excel's behaviour often gives them what they want despite their incompetence. This is just one small fruit on the tree grown of the millions of dollars spent by Microsoft on focus-group testing and UI design, which is still growing and bearing dividends. OpenOffice has a formidable competitor, even if it is overpriced.
(4) Consider using StarOffice, which is cheap (although not free, obviously) and handles Word and Excel documents better. Or, wait for whatever it is that 'GoBe Productive' is metamorphosing into, which I have not tried and cannot speak knowledgably about.
- undoware.ca
I've used it and while its not a bad office suite The .doc/.xls compatability isn't very good; for example I had a .doc file containing nothing but text it couldn't bring in right. So I tried exporting from word .rtf and then reimporting, same thing. These guys are years away from the really hard stuff like VBA, OLE... And lets not forget that at any point Microsoft can shift the ground (and given more corporate resistance they might want to do that for reasons having nothing to do with OO).
The other thing is that OO doesn't offer anything that Word doesn't have, except cost. By contrast LyX for example has lots of features that Word doesn't have, so it is more like comparing apples to oranges rather than cheap oranges to good oranges.
Anyway I think it comes down to this:
1) Does a small subset of office features cover all or almost all of your needs?
2) Is cost a big deal?
3) Can you handle only so-so importing?
Folks,
I'm seeing a lot of negative comments about MSO document conversion here, which I find surprising. I use OpenOffice.org exclusively, as do two of my clients, and all of us trade back and forth documents with MSO users all the time. The problems I've found are limited to:
1. Floating text boxes and lists in Word, two areas I will point out have problems converting between versions of Word as well.
2. Page formatting/header/footer stuff in Word where there are numerous section breaks. This is something we need to work on.
3. Dealing with unsupported fonts. Another area that could be smoother.
So, we still have some issues, but on my testing our conversions to/from MSO are better that WP Office or Mac:Office.
If, however, you have documents that do *not* agree with the above, how about joining the OpenOffice.org project and filing some issues so that we can debug? We're reverse engineering, here, folks, give us some help!
-Josh Berkus
OpenOffice.org
It's Ugly and Slow.
It can be ugly all right....
Ant it can be slow.
However, these can be remedies relatively easily. There is a wuickstart service that can run on Windows and something similar for *nix which keeps the common components loaded. I think that if you use this and get some good fonts, this will go along way toward your user experience.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I just installed OOo 1.0.1 on windows having being impressed with it on Linux, and it has a Quickstart feauter - so this should help with startup times...
I desperately want to deploy Open/Star office in my company. My one drawback was that in a 10 minute evaluation I could not figure out if I can I create a word processing document is Star and email it to a client and have them open it?
If not, how can I deploy this and expect my users to use it?
If you blog it...
Several things...
1) VBA macros will not work in imported documents, as these depend on the internal object model of WORD/EXCEL, etc. Star/Open is a different bird.
2) Star Office seems a little slower in some areas.
3) For importing/reading most basic MS Office formats, it works quite well. Guys on the shop floor use it to view work orders from management, saved $300 instead of using MS Office for file viewing
4) It has some nice features. The applications talk to each other very well. All open Star/Open office documents show up in each other's view menu. A simple click changes apps
5) The file format is XML stored inside a zip archive. You can open it up and pull out the text in a pinch
6)The notion of a MASTER document allows you to group other documents together into a book. IE, Pamphlets, labels, spreadsheets, can all be grouped together, with consistent page numbering and tables of contents/etc. REALLY COOL FEATURE.
7) Star Writer is ALMOST a DTP program. You can flow text around arbitrary objects, have multiple text streams, linked frames, etc. It's almost like a graphical TeX program.
8) StarOffice 6 is a BIG improvement over 5.2, in speed, ease of use, and functionality. I use it exclusively now on Linux. Open Office is part of Gnome now. XIMIAN is working HARD on making Star Office even more flexible, powerful, and friendly. It's central to their desktop push.
9) The API is currently poorly documente wrt StarBasic/JScript/Java, but it's being worked on. The API has undergone a major rewrite too. Yep, Star Office Macros will suport more than just Basic.
It's not perfect, but it has a lot good stuff MS doesn't and it's getting better all the time.
Use the Open Office Quick Start Applet(beta): http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooqstart/
Open Office works quite well for me on normal work computers, but my main production environment is a 40-person Windows 2000 Terminal Server. I had some users test it out, and we found that non-Admin users couldn't launch the apps, as it was looking for configuration files within the profile of the administrator who installed it. That, and lack of a replacement for Outlook as an Exchange email client killed the experiment. I look forward to trying again with a future version.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
The main complaint I have about OO is that it cannot open password protected Excel files. I'm sure that this is a fairly major barrier because I bet that it is fairly common practice to password protect spreadsheets (since they typically contain sensitive financial numbers).
I use the word processor and it appears pretty good. One nice feature is that it can print multiple pages onto one sheet of paper... (I know there's other ways)..
Start-up speed can be a problem, the win32 version has a pre-loader, not exactly sure if the Linux one does.
In fact, you can even set your OOo settings to default save to whatever format you want so you don't forget to convert it before sending.
While I admittedly loose in my definition of "enterprise", you're right: if it didn't go over well, my ass would have been grass. I'm the only IT guy--the guy who does the website, desktop support, router, phone system, etc. If things didn't go well, it would have put a BIG DENT in all other operations.
The quickstart for windows is part of the OOo package.
;) ) Look at the improvement though! Cracking package, hope it proves to be stable.
The quickstart for linux is here
I just installed it on my gnome desktop and it speeded the load of Writer from 25s to 5s. Yes I know those times suck, my box is a bit busy right now & I desperately need to invest in new hardware (or a cluster of old hardware
"Linux is a serious competitor"
- Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Microsoft Corp.