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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!"
Especially as the good people over at OO.o keep improving their software. I myself gave OO another look when 1.1 came out. Impressed is not the word. It removed any and all complaints I had about the software from the pre-1.0 and 1.0 versions. I actually PREFER it to the Office suite now, and I use it on my Powerbook, Windows partition, and Linux machine.
This is definitely one of those cases where an open source product is obviously of greater value than it's commercial counterpart, both financially and from a quality standpoint.
Keep up the good work, OO.o!
El riesgo vive siempre!
Seems to me that OO reading and writing .ms formats would have MS all over them for DMCA or other IP issues. Has any hay been made over this?
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I tried to tell a group of people-in-charge of local educational institutions how they could get away from Microsoft in this way...to a person, they were all very uninterested. It's not just a chicken-and-egg problem, it's the sad fact that nobody gets fired for lining up for the "Office Suite." I've used OpenOffice to great effect in my district, but I'm the only one I know of. What needs to change is that people need to start getting fired for NOT using OpenOffice...after all, with all of the budget problems all of the schools are having, switching to a "Free" product is the sensible thing to do. None of the schools I know of are sensible though.
I've shied away from earlier OO releases but have been very satisfied with the 1.1 release. I've been offering Open Office.org 1.1 to my clients as a cost effective alternative to MS Office and have gotten very positive feedback so far.
The article fails to attest that by switching to OpenOffice.org (free/open-source software), Austin City can save a lot of tax-money per desktop by switching. Average license costs for Microsoft Office Small Business is US$239 on government contracts. Working for a city government, I can attest that the tax dollars normally spent on office software are desprately needed in other areas. I applaud Austin City for setting this example and will be showing the article to my supervisor so I can make the case of switching.
I am glad to hear that OpenOffice is gaining more ground. I firmly believe OpenOffice will over take MS Office in the near future.
m l
If you haven't already check out the development section of their web site:
http://development.openoffice.org/index.ht
I am really amazed with the level of documentation, add on's, scripts/macros, and integration with other languages.
I work for a small company (actually owned by my father) and I've been pushing for migration for some time. Our problem is that we have several in-house Access databases that would be non-trivial to switch to something else. But this kind of story, at the very least, gives ammo to guys like me to convince the boss to switch.
Austin is a great place for geeks. We get all sorts of nice perks. For example, we have movie theater which not only serves beer, but also has had open 802.11b access for a long time.
The government also has pockets of very tech-savvy people, but they are often hampered by a lack of support. A current canidate for state representative Mark Strama is pretty "with it" technology-wise. (Founded NewVoter.com which was the first online voter registration in the US, and whose tech resulted in over 700K voter registrations in 2000.) Strama really wants to leverage new technology and open source where possible in his campaign, but hasn't had a lot of luck finding a full time technicial manager to oversee things.
Moving groups of non-technicial people to a new product (be it OpenOffice, Linux, or anything) requires some sort of on site advocate. The key to transition is having a knowledgable support person to make the technology "just work" as opposed to leaving the user to struggle on his or her own.
If you're interested in seeing open source succeed, consider helping out your local canidate use it in his or her race. Teach the leaders, the people will follow.
I would not be so certain that this is simply an Access migration issue, although it might be.
First the disclaimer: I hate M$. I've moved myself to the Apple platform, I run a Linux server at home, I almost never use my Windows machine.
But I've been in many clients' offices where I was about to save hundreds of man-hours where clerical people did repetitive tasks by writing a quick VBA application. I've also seen specialized applications (in particular, I have intimate exposure to one used in most non-profit organizations) built completely from the Windows COM/ActiveX architecture, and these apps integrate really nicely with Office in a way that OpenOffice would have to have strong COM integration to compete. (It may, I haven't looked recently.)
I felt bad writing these apps because I knew I was helping to entrench these clients in their Windows world, but when they are running on a shoestring budget (and non-profits get KILLER cheap deals with M$ software) if I can help cut an office's labor by 10% or more, I think I'm morally obligated to do so.
One last point: last time I gave OpenOffice a spin on Windows, it seemed to have a cool feature-set, but anything approaching a complex 100+ page document caused application crashes. I haven't seen Office crash since 2000.
For the most part, I'd say it's not a question of "if" but "when". But "when" might not be today.
Murray Todd Williams
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.
So, if everyone has been using Office for the last 10 years, they aren't going to want to try anything new, irregardless of the benefits of said change.
When this is the case, I find that users will suddenly get stupider. As dumb as they were before, and as clueless as they were before, they are now clueless with a purpose. That purpose? To make you regret making them change their desktop. Suddenly many will be looking for reasons to have things not work. The simplest of these being folks who think something doesn't work at all now, just because it doesn't work exactly like it used to. Others being the type who actively search for weak areas in the software so they can bitch about the lack of some arcane/unused feature that used to be available.
So, the solution to all this? Cut 'em a check. That's right, instead of just switching them over and telling them it's for the good of XYZ, figure out how much money you'll save to switch over to Open Office. Then take about 70% of your savings the first year and cut a check to be split up amongst your users. I would think that if everyone got a $100 in cash on the day you put Open Office on their machines, suddenly the guy installing OO around the office would be getting calls left and right by people who can't wait to get updated, vs. the grumblind you'd otherwise face.
After the first year you're still saving a bundle, everyone is used to OO, and the County can pocket the savings, all with a lot less headache.
I would guess that Dell is probably the largest private employer in Austin. Granted, they're technically in Round Rock. IBM has a relatively small campus in Austin, even after acquiring Tivoli. And as far as AMD goes, Intel also has an office there as well.
My guess is another reason, if not more likely, is The University of Texas. The UT CS department is a pretty open source heavy department. The rest of the university, other than the business school, is pretty apathetic to Microsoft. I would guess that people making these decisions in Austin are either influenced by, educated by, or former employees of the university.
Overall though, Austin is a pretty tech centric city. So, at least to me, who lived there for a number of years, this isn't really that much of a surprise.
Can anybody tell me why the OO team decided not to use the Win-Print.api that MS has available in the SDK?
I work for a printer company and I would _LOVE_ to use and show OO in our showroom but OO does not allow access to the WIN-print.api (therefore not allowing us to use the extra features/functionality that our devices offer).
OO is great if you have a 1-tray laser/inkjet printer. I could convert our office (and probably our corporation (still using Office97)), and my customers; by showing the cost savings that OO will provide, but dammit the drivers don't work.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Austin isn't the only place moving to OpenOffice. We completed about 2 months of conversion last Friday, and now the entire City is running OpenOffice software on Linux. There are a few pockets of of users finishing up their projects on WordPerfect, Excel and Powerpoint but 99% of them are converted and live on OO. That is about 100 concurrent users in OO at a time on one big server, and about 600 total users...all on thin clients.
:P That works nicely doesn't it?
The comments about users not liking change is true, and it's true that they complain no matter what you do---even upgrades of the same product.
We got word of a location that moved to OO on Win32, and they had a brilliant idea. OpenOffice was provided to them for use for free, if they wanted to continue to use Office they had to *buy their own copy* (~$399 payroll deduction + upgrades + support costs).
Dave Richards
City of Largo, Florida
drichard@largo.com