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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!"
Are you *sure* this is a local government agency?
....sounds like Austin has a savvy fellow in the CIO spot.
The Army reading list
Will this really help out OO or will it simply be an anomoly
IBM's Linux Technology Center is in Austin...
Openoffice.org: Keeping Austin weird since 2003.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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!
Microsoft is very Redmond-centric. They do almost all their development there. They did open development shops overseas (after successfully and heavily lobbying for a massive increase in H1-B guest workers quotas). Perhaps this is the leverage American cities need to force Microsoft to open development shops in their city. Why pay Microsoft so much when all the money's going to Bill Gates' mansion in Seattle?
I wonder what the other 20% are doing that OO.org can't handle? Some kind of bizzare Visual Basic macros that use Windows DLLs directly or something? Access databases that don't translate well across to other platforms? Access databases that can't be replicated in Adabas? Someone should ask them, and perhaps address their problems. After all I think that migration of 80% of 5000 desktops could yield some pretty good HCI and functional testing if they (especially as a government agency) are prepared to tell the open source community what issues they have with the product.
One can only hope this catches on in larger scale!!
Stop corporate
Certainly makes sense that they're going to need to solve that dependancy before they switch those people to OO.org...
So what is this one application that requires ms office, "Austin tell us what it is and let us fix it for you"
Got Code?
But it's always nice to picture Steve "Fester" Balmer after such news rushes in.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
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
Weird, I tried to read the article (yes .. i know .. this is slashdot) .. and couldn't find the article.
You obviously didn't read the article, however you also failed to consider something anyway. There are still things that OOo can't do that MS Office can. For example, I can't fully switch because I need the chart/graph capabilities that Excel has, but OOo doesn't. For Austin, it's a specific application. OOo is great for most people, but it's not a complete replacement just yet.
G
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 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.
Well, it's posted here, isn't that a trustworthy & unbiased source?
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
From: Scott Brown
Subject: [alg] Another Open Source win at the City
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:57:01 -0600
To: alg@austinlug.org
I thought a few of you might be interested in this...
We just concluded our first round of "official" Linux pilots, with one
of those being an OpenOffice replacement of Microsoft Office. It turns
out that the limited pilot we did (40 users) provided enough information
to be able to start converting some departments and users over to OO
from MS Office. First on the schedule is my department, Communications
and Technology Management, which will be having MS Office *uninstalled*
and OO installed in it's place on the majority of department desktops.
That should be around 300 people (we can't get everyone off MS Office
right now as we have one major application, the Agenda Management System
for the City Council, that requires the MS programs).
Training programs and help desk support is being put in place so it
looks like OO will be there for the long-term. Our pilot figured out
that about 80% of the users at the City could use OO instead of MS
Office so, at the very least, the City will not be paying Redmond for
anymore new licenses and at the very best, it will start converting
those apps that require MS Office over to something that will work in
the new OO environment.
We're finishing up the documentation for the rest of the pilots so I'll
keep ya'll posted...
-s.
--
Scott Brown
Technology and Support Services
OpenNetworks
website: http://www.opennetworks.org
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.
>Someone in Texass that has brains?
Most people in Austin moved there from other places in the 1980's. Most of the natives
got disgusted and left.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Even better, they could refund taxes to their local taxpayer base and allow them to spend their money on things that each family or households needs...
More money on education? When has that made a bit of difference?
You are comparing Mr. Ballmer to Uncle Fester?
Does this mean that if you put a lightbulb in his mouth it will light up, or at least produce a blue-screen-of-death?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
i think its really cool that OOo is starting to be more adopted in many places, replacing comercial office suits.
:)
many people still complain about the speed issue, and its great that that is on the major TO-DOs for OOo 1.2
"He also pointed out that not everyone can be converted just yet because of a single application (the City Council's Agenda Management System) requires MS Office to run."
If an single application requires MS Office to run, I bet its Access-based. I think once more applications are converted from Access to SQL, you'll have more conversions from MS Office to OO.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
How many of these desktops could subsequently be switched to Linux?
:)
In my experience, most city employees really only need a good Solitare implementation to accomplish their day-to-day work. Given the number of quality Solitare packages for Linux, it would probably be no issue to get everyone moved over.
Seriously though...for many, the hassle of setting up MS Office under WINE is a major stumbling block to moving to a Linux desktop. With the removal of MS Office from the equation, I would think that Austin may want to give Ximian Desktop or something of the sort a closer look.
-JT
Open Office is an amazing bundle of software, but I swear, saving in microsoft formats (particularly Word). Looks a bit hairy when you actually open them in MS Word. Same goes for microsoft's powerpoint. 100% would save these troubles. Now there are just going to be a group of peeved employees that have to realign their tabs and spacing if they ever have to use OO Word doc's on word. Then again, they might have forseen this and aren't going to be using MSWord on that other 20%. It could work.
Nope. The DMCA has an exception for "compatibility" issues. MS doesn't make Word for *n?x, so the compatibility argument stands. Just because the OOo team ports it to other platforms that do have Office (OSX, Windows), doesn't matter.
The previous sig has been removed due to
Yup. I moved from Austin to Bremerton, WA and no to St. Louis. Gotta go where the jobs are.
Nice to see a city that sucks up to Dell/AMD/IBM go away from M$
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
You know the meaning of FUD, right? Just because something is wrong OR unverified, doesn't make it FUD.
Mod point free since 2001
"Until I see a credible news source (I mean like USA Today, CNN [...]"
Hahahahahahaha. Thanks, I needed that.
I won't believe this. This story is FUD. FUD FUD FUD. FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD FUD.
Calm down now, Steve. You know that the heart doctor told you about getting so worked up.
Yes, even about developers...
I find it very interesting that some people complain that slashdot just rehashes old news from other websites while others complain that slashdot publishes news that hasn't been confirmed on other websites. Do you want a news site or a search engine?
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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.
It costs OEMs money to preload applications and distribute CDs/documentation. If someone isn't paying, they're not going to do it, as far as I can see.
G
You know the meaning of FUD, right? Just because something is wrong OR unverified, doesn't make it FUD.
Well obviously it's anti-Microsoft FUD, trying to convince people that not every business computer runs Office. Silly, I know, but there are probably some managers out there feeling uncertainty and doubt about the hegemony of Microsoft, and wondering why they don't switch.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think "rumor" is the word you're looking for, not "FUD".
Alright, now I'm confused. Everytime someone says something bad about open source software it's FUD. Now someone says OO.org is being adopted in some city I live nowhere near, and that's FUD because it might not be true. So basically everything I read about software could be FUD. CNET spreads FUD, and now apparently Newsforge spreads FUD. Life is getting too complicated and political...I need some FUDge. Shit, I might be spreading FUD! or even a weapon of mass FUD (WMFUD). And that could be Microsoft's next windows media file format! That's FUD too! I have to balance it out by preaching OGG Vorbis! But wait, then I make the assumption that no one uses and few media players support OGG. Wait, that could be FUD too. I guess my only solution is to filter all articles that contain the word FUD in them. Now I'm spreading FUD about FUD. FUDCK!
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've gotten about 30% of the computers in my workplace converted over to OpenOffice. We are a very MS Office heavy environment, so there have been some problems, but fewer than I expected. The problems all seem to be one-way, too, converting MS to OO rather than the other way around. It can be done.
Boycott everything - they're all trying to fuck you one way or another
Bah, come on now, this is government we're talking about here. Tax Refund is an oxymoron.
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
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uh...you raise some good points, but where's this fear, uncertainty, despair that you speak of?
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
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.
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And you know that FUD has at least two different interpretations, right? To many people, that D stands for Disinformation. (It is left as an exercise for the reader to determine what the F and the U might stand for.) I think that makes the poster's choice of phrasing quite apt.
barenakedCaniac
nick_harris@bridge-point.com
(email not shown publicly)
Karma: Bad
Hi Nick!
See the comment of janderk at the end. Essentially, he tried to convert a Dutch school but because of this bug, he failed.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
As a Texas resident, I'm glad to see this. If we can convince Governor Rick Perry (R) to extend this into more state agencies. I'll be extremely pleased.
Like they say, no matter when you moved to Austin, it was better before you got here.
Well, it's posted here, isn't that a trustworthy & unbiased source?
You are trying to be funny but...
By the time everyone has had a chance to bash a comment, what comes out is pretty close to the truth. Yes a single comment can be garbage, but the aggragate comments should be OK.
In my opinion of course.....
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
.. having worked in IS Support, I know that there are some right tools in the wrong jobs.
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.
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)
article is short
City of Austin pilot proves OpenOffice.org works
Wednesday December 17, 2003 - [ 02:38 PM GMT ]
Topics: Office Software , Open Source , Software
By: Joe Barr
The City of Austin recently completed a group of pilot studies on the use of open source software in its day-to-day business. According to a message posted this morning on the Austin LUG mailing list by Scott Brown, the results are in, and as a result, as many as 80% of the city's desktops will be migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
Brown noted in his email message that his department (Communications and Technology Management) will be the first to convert by uninstalling MS Office and putting OpenOffice.org in its place on about 300 desktops. The city has more than 5,000 desktops in total.
He also pointed out that not everyone can be converted yet because of one application (the City Council's Agenda Management System) that requires MS Office to run.
Brown also told the mailing list that "Training programs and help desk support is being put in place so it looks like OO will be there for the long-term."
More details to follow.
-ASQ
I guess I see a lot of experimentation going on and it's not really a surprise to see a gov agency switching over. It will save them millions. This is only news because it's one of the first. Always thought Austin was a very cool town. Sort of out of place in Texas.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As a copy of the e-mail has now been posted, thereby confirming the story, I would encourage people to moderate the parent posting accordingly.
When exactly did the Gannett owned, Reuters dominated USA Today become a credible news source? Or CNN, notorious for parroting the positions of those with vested interests without even bothering to check if it makes sense or contradicts earlier statements? All of the mentioned periodicals are tertiary news sources... They rely upon other people who have seen the news, and are willing to talk about it. USA Today is arguably a quadiary news source, as it just recycles tertiary articles from other sources. The e-mail posted from the initiator of this project is a primary news source, and an article posted by someone who has seen this e-mail is a secondary news source. Primary and secondary news sources, while necessarily less well known as they do not focus on the dissemination of news, are a far more accurate source of information than those who re-release pre-digested data.
You just got the best news source you could hope to get, and you complained because it wasn't USA Today.
The ______ Agenda
The subject line ought to read:
... home of Hormel Foods, maker of Spam.
"City Of Austin (Texas) Migrating To OpenOffice.org."
Otherwise there may be confusion with Austin, Minnesota
-kgj
-kgj
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Ummm... no.
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Intentionally harming your competition by ispiring those feelings about a product/program through public announcements is FUD.
A good example would be what Microsoft has been saying about viral licenses and the GPL. All they need to do is get a good buzz going about "viral licenses", and wheher it is true or not, the competition has to waste time addressing their customer's fear, uncertainty and doubt.
I can speak for the company I work for. We use Word for processing electronic change notices for engineering, and the macros tie in closely with Outlook (email addresses). We couldn't easily swap out Word for OO without re-desigining that process, and believe me it was a pain politically and technically to get it to the point that it is today.
Day to Day word processor and spreadsheet use would be a totally different story.
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
He also pointed out that not everyone can be converted yet because of one application (the City Council's Agenda Management System) that requires MS Office to run.
I'm sure it could be run on a cheaper and more open system that didn't require M$ applications to run it. MySQL/PHP or FileMaker would both be good database apps to use.
The web should be platform and application independent, even for management systems, but Bill's insistance on Microsoft products on both the client and sever sides will only limit the use of his products, not expand his market share.
And when will Open Office be available for OS X? I know they have one for X-11, but changing GUI interfaces everytime I need to type something is too much trouble.
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.
who sees this as a very bad precedent to set? Give your users money because they don't want to type number into a spreadsheet in OO rather than MSO?
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None of the Linux solitaire implementations do that card thing when you win. That's a necessary feature IMHO. Also, I haven't run across a particularly good Linux pinball game, so we're falling behind again. By the way, ever notice that the guy in the spaceship in "Space Cadet Pinball" looks suspiciously like Ballmer? Coincidence? I think not...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
They talked about how hard it is to get Office working under WINE, but Office DOESN'T work under WINE _AT ALL_ because office uses undocumented windows APIs.
That' what stood out as I read it, and that's what I assume the moderator's reasoning was.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
WHY must you fucks continue to refer to it as "openoffice.org"
I absolutely despise when people tack on a TLD to the name of a piece of software, shit, I think I'll just start referring to everything with its associated TLD.
Hi, I attend Purdue.edu
Our shitty servers at work run software from Microsoft.com
My hometown is Aiken.net
I first attended SC.edu
yeah, sounds just as stupid as I thought it would
Help fight continental drift.
As a Houston native, I watched a whole lot of my friends from high school move to Austin. So far, none of them have moved back. As Austin is a major university town and is the capital of Texas, there are always a lot of people moving to and from the area. As far as the native Austinites go, I'll bet you still find plenty of them around, it's just that Austin has grown so much in the past couple of decades that the native population is now far outnumbered by the non-natives. That is not to say that many Austinites have not left Austin, but I would hesitate to say most.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
Killer Application.
It's odd that that such an old Office Suite that was struggling so hard comes to be such a success years later. And that the reason it does is so mundane does make me wonder even more: It simply offers the very same (or even better) performance that an established competition and is dirt cheap. Free as in beer, actually.
Coming to think of it, that actually isn't a bad reason to become a Killer Application.
What I really find astounding is that Open Office actually tries to emulate MS Office and thus isn't half as intuitive and performant as Lotus Smart Suite, imho.
Anyway: OO.o combined with the new KDE 3.2 is the next big step in toppling a monopoly. I expect Linux to reach critical mass in germany any time soon (within the next 12 months or so).
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I personally love OpenOffice and use it almost always at home. But I have found out that it still causes formatting problems with most Word documents at work. Today for example, I had a footer what use to fit on one line with inches to spare now wrap around. After some investigation, I discovered that the page number on the right side of the footer was left justified at a tab setting and that the field seemed to extend beyond the beginning of the margin. This apparently caused OpenOffice to deposit the field on the next line at the first tab stop which was at the middle of the line. I can make changes to the document, but I still need Word to compare my changes to the original. I see many other formatting hassles like this - particularly with tabs, outlines, and tables.
My current annoyance is that when I close a read-only Word Doc, Open Office crashes on me every time.
To me it looks like we still have about 6 months before OOo can be used in offices that have lots of pre-existing documents or get lots of Word documents from outside sources.
Don't get me wrong. I eagerly wait for the day when I can delete Word from my system at work. Just, OpenOffice needs another half year or so.
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There's only one real Austin, just as there's only one real Paris. Both are in Texas. ;)
The real Austin is an aging ex-astronaut.
-kgj
-kgj
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I still have some conversion issues (the WP doesn't like MS's superscripts or subscripts much and embedded graphics generally don't work on conversion from MS). Also, I think the graphing/charting in the spreadsheet is ugly as can be, and they could do with separating the poducts out to make the whole thing lighter. But it's getting there. It's more stable (though that's not to say very stable), and I really like its equation editor.
That said, it's still not for situations where people need to be able to open complex, microsoft-formatted documents, particularly those with graphics and formulae embedded.
However, I'm sure it's fine for the city of Austin, as bureaucrats could get by with typewriters, I expect.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
After the initial encounter, the Texan food kills and disposes of the French food, prints out a copy of its own MSDS, and enjoys a job well done.
....
I see that we've broken into the same alternate universe
-kgj
-kgj
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
You'd think savings could be passed along to the taxpayers. I'm sure the money will just be shifted to some other non-essential program.
Constitutionally Correct
In our office we have the advocate (me), my problem is convincing management.
Does anyone know of any tools/tutorials that are specifically designed to convince MS Office user's to switch? I sent my manager a suggestion about OpenOffice months ago, but he hasn't had time to look at it. If I had a 15 minute tutorial that walked through the basics of the word processor and spreadsheet it might help.
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My issues weren't with creating pretty pictures for presentations, but with APA-style charts, proper for submission to scientific journals. There were several essential features missing, foremost among them was the inability to have standard error bars made using specific data (OOo only lets you use certain formulae - I need to use my numbers). In Excel, you can simly select the cells which contain the values you want to use (which is what OOo needs). There were a bunch of issues with customizing appearance, but I don't recall specifics (once I was certain I couldn't get the SE bars, there was no point in further attention).
Oh, and I had forgotten about word count - I continuously have to copy/paste into Word to get that data.
OOo is fine for most people, but not everyone - many features which may seem inane to you may be essential to me.
G
Beside our building is a small government-run business center. There is a reception with two ladies. I go there now and then. Every single time, and I mean every single time, they are both playing Solitaire on the PCs.
Granted, it's a sign they have nothing to do. But that's not exactly uncommon in government offices.
It is true that playing Solitaire is a sign both of sloth and of ignorance - there are much better ways to waste one's time - Slashdot for instance. I assume the two poor deprived ladies are without an Internet connection.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
I tried switching the office to Open Office two months ago when we got some new machines and I thought great, now I can save some dough on our Office Applications. Spreadsheets were ruined by OO, formulas didn't compute the same, background colors were change in cells, there is no such thing as a shared spreadsheet, and printing looked aweful. My boss chewed me out big time for that. The Word counterpart was difficult to read and did't print out the same as Word.
I wonder if Austin can get a system that dosn't have these problems. Novice and even intermediate computer users will no doubt be confused by the way things work differently. I hope it forces OO to get better as I think that it could kick MS ass being backed by Sun, free to use, Open Source, and a fresh alternative.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
As somebody who worked in the Education sector, I find it's hard to save thousands and thousands of dollars considering that a copy of office costs about $30 per workstation, not $300. Remember Educational discounts. Its cost practically nothing for schools to run Microsoft products. There are several reasons they don't want to switch.
#1. Allot of people know/understand Microsoft. There is allot of published documentation and help is usually a phone call or google away.
#2. The business world uses Microsoft products. Not everybody graduating from high school will be a computer tech/engineer. In fact, I would say that less that 1% of each graduating class would be able to qualify at tech/engineer material. Having students knowledgeable in Word, Excel, and Windows is required, what good does it to teach students in Lotus or WordPerfect or Open Office, where after high school they are working in a office setting using something different. They will have to relearn their toolset. Not good.
I know for a fact cause I saw it every day, Its possible to take a student right out of MS Office class and put them in an office building environment and they will do good work, maybe not the best, but you don't have to teach them how to do spell checks or form feeds or other things. Where I worked we used a lot of PC's about 70% worth, but some schools had Apple machines instead, and used apple works or something similar. When I would hire students for our CO-OP program you could tell the Apple users, "I never have used word before". We had good staff that could train these people and get them up to speed, but the point remains, the world uses Microsoft Office. The schools while using Open Office or something else is nice, there is and should be a need to teach Microsoft products. Not teaching them would be wrong to the learning process of students preparing for the business world.
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That's all I wanted to know. You might want to clarify your point in future posts so people understand what points you are referring to, instead of getting the impression that charting and graphing are simply missing. :-)
My take on OO overall, is that it's great for home and business use. But when it comes to publishing and data analysis, it still falls short. Still, covering 85% of the users is pretty good. I use it and am (for the most part) happy with it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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Oh Behave! OOo Powers Austin!
Free as in mason.
Rekall, now go look it up and it does what Access does even better.
Got Code?
I never even knew that was there! Office actually has it in its tools menu, so I was looking for a menu option. Thanks for the tip! You've just made me a very happy person! :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
One thing I've noticed, as a long-time Windows user who has recently begun working at a company who's primary product involves their own brand of linux, is that movements to suites like OpenOffice can't really work at the grass roots level, because of the very nature of what that suite is - an OFFICE suite. Offices are by their very nature highly bureaucratised, and the main reason, even at my employer, that most of the administrative people use MS products is because thats what everyone else uses.
Seeing someone like the government take the initiative to step away from this deadlock should be highly motivational to advocates and evangelists of Open Source, because it signals that some people in positions of REAL influence are getting the idea.
It should be noted that Austin is a very tech-savvy and liberal-minded (and I don't mean that in the politickal sense, even though it's true there too) city, so this was a likely candidate for such a move, but it's still big.
I really have to think that many, many more significant government organizations will have to undergo changes like this before it really even begins on in the corporate world.
Moo
We have open 802.11 at the cafe in town, and one day we may even tell the office across the road. ;-p
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Added to the Newsforge story is a new item suggesting that the Slashdot story is wrong:
Updated - CIO requests clarifications
Pete Collins, CIO of the City of Office, contacted NewsForge today after being beseiged with calls about this story. He wanted to clarify two inaccuracies in the story: that the pilots are complete and that 80% of the city's desktops can be migrated to OpenOffice.org.
Collins says that the installation of OpenOffice.org on some 300 seats in his department (Communications Technology Management) does not mark the end of the pilot phase and the beginning of a migration. He told us "What's going on is that we've almost completed the first phase of our pilot. We will be looking at the information we've gathered over the months in different uses of Linux within the city."
He added "I've been using OpenOffice on my desktop for a couple of months, and it has worked quite well." He also said that another assessment would be done at the end of the second phase.
Collins stressed to us that "The intent is not to replace the entire city with OpenOffice at this moment in time." His major concern is that our story was misleading the public into thinking "the results are totally in, because they are not."
I used to do similar things on Unix, years ago - no VBA, you'd just build text using whatever text tools you wanted, pipe it through your favorite combinations of grep/awk/sed/sh, and hand it to whatever output program you wanted. Sure, it was simpler-looking most of the time, and usually wasn't WSIWYG, but you could put in troff macros back then, or HTML tokens today, if you wanted things pretty-printed, and you could really accomplish most of the same things without needing to embed dangerous programming capabilities into word-processors. (or if you _wanted_ to do that, you could build in magic tags for vi or emacs anyway :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks