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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...
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?
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?
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.
If only there was some type of document, or article, that laid out the facts of the case.. it'd make things so clear and straightforward. I mean, gosh, wouldn't be nice if a person interviewed the relevant people and put the results in some type of hyperlinked document attached to this story?
Someone should read the article, where they would find the following:
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.
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.
I wonder what the other 20% are doing that OO.org can't handle?
:" or "Ctrl + ;"?
Sectional word counts?
*.CHM export?
Auto-insert of date and time in an excel spreadsheet with "Ctrl +
Managed website (not single web-page) updates?
>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.
"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
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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Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
I think "rumor" is the word you're looking for, not "FUD".
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 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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
pivot tables == data pilot.
:)
learn it, love it.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
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)
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
Help fight continental drift.
The actual name of the software is OpenOffice.org. The software is not, not, NOT named OpenOffice, or Open Office.
The reason is because Open Office would conflict with the trademark of some Korean office suite.
If more open source software projects would name themselves after their domain name, it would make it really easy for customers to know where to go for information. Imagine if Mozilla.org would do this.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The article mentions one application that (currently) requires MS Office, there may be others.
The thing is, migrating the easy 80% gives OOo the dominant desktop position. Certainly any new apps will be written to be OOo-friendly, and there will be pressure to port the old ones. I'm sure they have their IT people looking at what it'd take to do that. Might be an opportunity there for developers or companies in the Austin area with migration/porting experience.
-- Alastair
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
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
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
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
Oh Behave! OOo Powers Austin!
Free as in mason.
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.
creation science book