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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."
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...
"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.
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!
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
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.)
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
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!
You obviously never used OpenOffice before. You can work with OOo through COM under MS Windows just as you can with MS Office.
Here is a little VB Script example, copy n paste the text below into a text file and save it as ooo.vbs, then just double click it and watch.
office_automation
writerdemo
There is nothing open about MS Office. Where can I download the specs of the MS Office formats? Oh, that is right, they are proprietary "IP". But wait, MS Office 2003 uses "open" XML. Gee that is just great, too bad the encoded data in the XML is proprietary "IP" and the XML wrapper is more of a PR stunt then MS truly opening up the MS Office documents formats.
A better solution is to use OPEN STANDARDS. Instead of having your application spit out some MS Word doc, have it spit out HTML or PDF. Then anyone, anywhere can read it. Instead of spitting out an MS Excel file, have it spit out a plain ole CSV file. Then you can import it to just about any app or DB and work with the data any way you want.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison