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City Of Austin Migrating To OpenOffice.org
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge.com has a story up this morning about the City of Austin and the results of their pilot program on OpenOffice.org. The bottom line is this: they have found that more than 80% of the city's 5K desktops can use OO.o instead of MS Office. Let the migrations begin!"
No kidding. Glad there's someone out there making good decisions about technology. "His vision of the future of IT at the City of Austin is of a hybrid environment: using the right tool for the right job without blind allegience to any platform."
Weird, I tried to read the article (yes .. i know .. this is slashdot) .. and couldn't find the article.
But do they have an EA? If so, they still got to pay for Office. I don't care one way or the other but..... wholesale changes create major problems. Especially when it comes to government agencies that have to interface with other entities. On the other hand, 90% of the Austin employees probably only need a rudimentary word processor program and email (probably don't NEED email). Blah...
How about "Take some of the money you just saved and fund someone to fix it for you?"
Do you think the choice has anything to do with Sun's decision to offer OpenOffice.org support? The timing seems to suggest so. Perhaps this will encourage other open source sposors to do something similar.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
I think "rumor" is the word you're looking for, not "FUD".
"I firmly believe OpenOffice will over take MS Office in the near future."
I don't mean to sound trollish, but what exactly is your definition of "near future"? Because from where I sit, I don't see OpenOffice taking over MS Office within this decade alone. Not because OpenOffice isn't a good product, but because of the fact that hundreds of thousands of companies have millions (if not billions) of dollars invested in their infrastructure which includes MS Office, Exchange, etc... That takes time to convert.
That's actually a pretty astute observation. I used to live in Oklahoma City where the voters approved a 1 cent MAPS Tax to increase funds available to renovate downtown OKC. They got a riverwalk (sort of), a baseball field (which was subsequently bought by and named Southwestern Bell Field, keep in mind this was publicly funded), a renovated Bricktown area, etc. Ok, so once everything was built, the MAPS tax disappeared right? Hell no! It's still in effect to this day.
My father said his father gave him a nugget of wisdom before he died. He said that new taxes never, ever disappear. Once the government becomes dependent on the income from a new tax, they never kill it, even if it was designed for a new project that has a clear completion date.
Here's a good reason why Austin might be doing this.
Austin had a good scare a while back, with rumors of a Microsoft/BSA audit of the city's computers. The BSA is based in Austin, BTW. Anyway, I'm willing to bet that Austin didn't take too kindly to the hassles that Microsoft put them through, and are now happily giving them the boot up their ass.
Good for them.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
This is obviously good news, but the more important question is what is happening at educational institutions like University of Texas? They receive discounted pricing on MS Office products (as do students), so universities tend to be agnostic about which office applications to use for school assignments.
A more dramatic and interesting revelation would be if University of Texas at Austin declared a university-wide preference for nonproprietary file standards for school assignments. Up until now, their agnosticism on the proprietary/nonproprietary standard issue (because of educational discounts and the available of MS Office support) have implicitly propped up the market for MS Office. A UT graduate who uses MS Office for four years is more likely to prefer it at the office or at home later on.
I would like to see more evidence that public educational institutions are shifting to software with more open standards.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Living in Austin, I can tell you this is a tech center for the State of Texas and the southwest. I seems like everytime I start talking to some in public, at a store, etc, they are a techie of some sort. There is a huge population of software companies here in Austin, even after the bubble. I think the fact that the City will be switching to Open Office *might* make a statement to the national technology community that Open Source has grown up.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I doubt you will see any of that.
One, hate them as much as the next guy, but one thing I can't say about M$ is that they sue everyone and their dog, so the court doesn't seem to be their primary weapon.
Two, such a lawsuit would open a lot of eyes to the fact that your documents are being taken hostage.
Nah. What they'll do is double the efforts for the next format to be even harder to import.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Anyone who's been around IT for a while knows that a successful pilot doesn't really mean that it's a done deal. Especially, when the IT dept is essentially doing another, large, pilot test.
So, this story seems premature. It should be "City of Austin Considering Migrating to OO.o".
(BTW, I worked at a place that did the same thing a few years ago, except with Lotus SmartSuite which could be had almost for free from IBM. SmartSuite worked great in the IT dept, but a large number of users said "Fuck You" and started pirating MS Office. This led to a showdown between IT and a VP, and IT got their ass handed to them. Next thing you know, they are buying/supporting both Lotus and Microsoft.
So, IT Dude saying that OO is a great solution doesn't really mean anything, politically.)
"The right tool for the right job," is a great motto, but in this case they're saying MS Office is the only tool they can use. If it were really the right tool for the job we would have been hearing about how much better that tool is on MS Office rather than the fact that they're just stuck using it.
This should be leading to some good discussions about open standards rather than just open source. If that app had been built on an open standard then a real comparisson could have been made between the office platforms based merit rather than lock-in.
TW
Now, I do a lot of IT work, seeing as it's my job. One thing I've found more often than not is that people DON'T like to change whatever it is they're used to.
... MS Office or OOffice and software budget rebate :)
Guess what, people hate changing from version to version of MS Office too. You should have heard the moans of fear in my workplace when it was rumored that we were going to be upgrading. You could just wait until the next major MS Office upgrade and give them a choice
Some kind of bizzare Visual Basic macros that use Windows DLLs directly or something?
You've obviously never used Windows before. See, for the past, oh, I dunno, 8 years or so, Windows has had this thing called "COM". "COM" is what makes writing Windows apps cheap and easy. It's a way of reusing objects (OOP). So, there's nothing bizarre about using DLL's. Most major Windows apps relies on them heavily. But you don't use them directly, you generally use COM to access them. And the MS Office COM objects are generally called "VBA". There's a whole giant object model for all of MS Office called VBA that is often used extensively. It's pretty nice. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, if you need say, spreadsheet functionality in your app, you just use, say, the Excel.Workbook object. So more than likely, there's at least one app taking advantage of the openness of MS Office, which would take a lot of time and money to re-write, since the object model in Open Office is completely different, if it exists at all.
Well, then you sure as hell are not running the same Office 2000 we are running here!
We have about 10 desktops running Windows and Office 2000 here. I am the closest thing to a help desk we have and I spend about 20% of every day helping people try to figure out why Word/Excel/Access is doing the weird thing it is or trying to recover docs/spreadsheets/Access databases that were corrupted with or without a crash. Pages in manuals just disapear; cells in spreadsheets randomly have the formulae change and whoever decided that Access reports should reflect changes back into the Access database should be fired!
These are all fairly new desktop systems, we don't do anything really fancy and no other app we use causes anywhere near as much grief (a distant 2nd is AutoCAD Lite). We are seriously looking at OO 1.1. No matter how bad it is, it cannot be as bad as MS Office!
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nope wrong. once OO.org is able to run VBA macros and is able to respond to solutions that have embedded Word (Outlook embeds Word as its email editor if you wish) and access to Word's API and DOM - THEN you will have conversion so OO.
i work on software in the legal sector and just about every instance of word in the legal sector has some sort of customisation done to it. wether it be document management integration with Hummingbird or iManage or maybe just a set of macros to centralise and populate templates etc...
people often don't realise the power of Office's VBA and the heavy investment that document-centric organisations have made in this technology.
this will be OO's biggest stumbling block regarding adoption.
If an single application requires MS Office to run, I bet its Access-based.
...and you'd be surprised how many of my colleagues who are network admins at other mid-size and even larger city govts in Texas read and post to Slashdot daily :-)
I'm the network administrator for another city govt in Texas, somewhat smaller (pop 100K) and a couple hundred miles north of Austin, and I'll bet that his council agenda system is based on MS Word templates instead... exactly just like ours is... and derived from the same council agenda management system project that about a dozen other Texas cities adopted (and adapted) a few years ago from a demo we saw at a TML conference.
We've seriously looked at ditching MS Office for OO too, but we've not only got the council agenda app that won't port cleanly and will need a complete new replacement, we also have a municipal court system that's intimately tied to MS Word as one of its integral components. We may be replacing the court system in its entirety next year, so maybe OO will stand another chance at bat then. Meanwhile, we've frozen at Office 2000 and new PCs we buy have to be preloaded with OEM Office 2K or XP depending on iff we can still get 2K from each vendor we buy from. We're not planning to buy Office 2K3 at all right now, and will milk our existing Office 2K and XP we have on hand for all they're worth until forced to change. We are, however, upgrading all our network operating system infrastructure to Windows 2003 Server since we have several other enterprise apps with are forcing upgrades upon us that will require an MS Active Directory infrastructure to operate at all, and presently we are still stuck at NT4... and yes, some Linux too.
Posting A/C, naturally. Your tax dollars at work here posting to Slashdot.
No, I didn't mean a 10 year old install of Office, rather that they've been using Office for their word processing, spreadsheets etc. for the last 10 years. (although mutiple revisions)
Much like WordPerfect users didn't want to switch to Office (who can blame them) because they'd been using Word Perfect forever (and it actually funtioned properly, and could show codes). That doesn't mean they're still using version 3.1 though.
No, it says the _marketing_ has a long way to go. The product is fine, and does 95% of what people need. If not 99%...
There have been 16 million OOo downloads, and that doesn't include Linux distro sales. It's big. But as govt agencies typically take years to make a switch, this is big news.
Get out more.
Weird, yes. But I see it as an opportunity for a small development shop in Austin to score a nice project.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
So, if a new product comes out and, no matter how incredibly awesome it might be, if they report that someone bought the product that would be an indication that the product has a long way to go?
Remember that the next time Microsoft brings out a new product and the first sales figures are reported....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
If you find that current products do 100% of what you'd want them to then I think you're very lucky (if somewhat unimaginative).
A better question would be 'does it meet my needs as well as or better than the competition?'
Someone else will respond probably too, and this point has been brought up numerous times. They should NOT teach Microsoft Office specifically (unless it's an elective class called 'MS Office' or something). What should be taught is the concepts. Teaching people not to be afraid of the computer, and to learn basic ideas like spell checking, formatting (bold, italics, etc). The basics are the same on every major platform, have been for years, and will continue to be. If there's a need to teach "Excel Macros", that's fine, but label the class as such.
What will you do when someone learned MS Office 2000 2 years ago, left school, and gets a job 2 years from now using Office 2005XP or something like that? If they've been trained to 'select the 4th option in the 3rd menu' they're screwed anyway. *I* wouldn't hire anyone like that. I would hire someone who comes across as competent *and* confident with a computer, regardless of which version of an office suite I throw at them.
Money leaving the school districts for Microsoft products when the same budgets have school lunch programs cut, textbooks not being purchased, and teachers being laid off is simply immoral.
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