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OpenOffice.org, MS Office 2003 Compared, Evaluated
kotj.mf writes "eWeek is running a relatively lengthy article comparing OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2003, as part of an IT decision whether to migrate a 300-plus userbase office away from Office 97/2000. The not-so-surprising conclusion: OO.o can be a better deal for smaller companies that can't fully leverage Redmond's volume licensing. Hell, it'd be cheap at twice the price."
Remember that StarOffice is supposed to be the "Stable" branch that is purchased in quantity for large corperations. Sun really doesn't want large coperations using the free version.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
And...? There's a lot of stuff that's free. Doesn't make it necessarily better (just as paid items aren't necessarily better). Most of us folk (who have matured to a certain extent) know to use the best tool for the job. In some cases (like when you're working with Exchange) that's Outlook 2003.
Here are the 3 things that will prevent OpenOffice from replacing MS Office massively:
.DOC compatibility
.DOC compatibility
.DOC compatibility?
.DOC almost 100%. Then they'd take over the market IMHO...
- Lack of good specialized dictionaries (in particular, a good medical dictionary)
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Oh, and did I mention
I mean, I know it's hard to be compatible with a format that never was disclosed by Microsoft, but there it is: I personally can testify that, while using OpenOffice internally would be roughly equivalent in functionalities to MS Office, exchanging files with the rest of the world is a total bitch.
Microsoft's stranglehold on the Office suite market rests almost entirely on keeping its formats undisclosed, and on shifting them all the time to keep the target moving. I wish the OOo people could stop doing anything else but supporting at least one incarnation of
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Until OO is 100% comptible with MSOffice, it will not be likely a small business would switch to it. It puts them at a disadvantage when trying to look like a big company. Image is everything when you're a little guy playing with the big boys.
OpenOffice loads most of our documents perfectly. It supports a wide variety of file formats. Its default compressed xml format produces files that are a tiny fraction of the size of equivelant Office documents. My bosses especially like the fact that it's free of charge, and we install it on every new pc we get.
The main issues I have with it are its slowness and high memory usage under Windows compared to Office. I also miss having an equivelant to the Excel solver utility, which can optimize hundreds of variables at once to minimize/maximize a result. My first use of it involved stock prediction. It performed quite well at optimizing a set of over a hundred weights to predict a stock based on years of past data, if only to prove to me that numerically predicting a single day into a stock's with a profitable level of accuracy is almost impossible. I'll be using NN's in my next attempt. Did I mention I have ADD?
A transition doesn't have to be painless to be worthwhile. It certainly doesn't have to be painless to be cost-effective. Microsoft has gone a LONG way to make sure that any transition will result in a good dose of pain. Break it sooner or it only gets worse.
You start by telling your employees that your switching. Explain why you're switching. Explain that you know it will be inconvenient or even a huge pain in the ass. Tell them you're counting on them to put out a lot of effort and come up to speed as quickly as possible on the new software. You're proud of you're employees, and you know they'll make you proud again.
That won't eliminate any of the end-user frustration. It will, however, make the transition a success; because it lets the users know that the decision is made, and that there is an expectation for them to adjust to it.
You don't want to ignore your employees by any means; but you sure don't want to give up significant cost savings (which by the way indirectly benefit them) just because they can't learn the new menus.
After all, who's in charge?
The true test is your ability to make good financial decisions and to make those decisions work.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
The costs of migration are a one-time cost. The costs of licensing are a continuing cost. Sometimes you have to eat it in the short term to meet your long term goals.
Uh.. I hate to tell you folk this but let me let you in on a little secret... .DOC documents have incompatibilities with varying versions of MS OFFICE! :O The HORROR!
.DOC as if it's some sort of Mecca of compatibility. Truth: It SUCKS and it's BROKEN. I mean, everything's cool, as long as you don't go back too many versions, or use the wrong copy of Works, right? Well... In light of this, how can it be said that OOo is any less compatible only being 3 years old?!
.org can afford to keep up with General Electic's IT budget. Smaller schools such as ours can't just plunk down this kind of money every two years to insure compatibility with MS's latest fashions.
Geez, people treat
You know, not every
With OOo's XML I do look forward to being able to see my documents 20 years from now just as they are today (hopefully on a flat screen the size of my house of course).
Seriously. When I arrived at this school we had students using different versions of Works and Office at home and in the dorms (not to mention Wordperfect and even Wordpad!) Then you had international issues with MS Office, which I understand most of these are resolved now in 2003. Still...
Open/StarOffice let us completely standardize our documentation here. It allowed me to offer a free copy of the software to every student, parent, and teacher. It's not perfect, but then neither is MS Office.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"Nothing is ever free."
This is true, but sometimes this idea is used improperly. For example, I've heard it said "Linux is free only if your time costs nothing." Well, it could equally be said "Windows is only $300 if your time costs nothing."
So, to say OOo is free is just as wrong as to say Microsoft Office costs $499. If someone said Microsoft Office costs $499 would you correct them? If not, perhaps you shouldn't also be correcting people who say that Linux is free. It's kind of a double-standard.
Engineering and the Ultimate
The article misses the most important reason to consider Open (or Star) Office - portability. Its a well-established (but unfortunately often forgotten) good business principle to never tie yourself in to one supplier.
Until a couple of years ago there was no 'good enough for most purposes' alternative to MS Office. Now there is, and companies finally have freedom to choose their desktop systems.
Switch to Open Office and you can migrate gradually to Unix or Linux desktops using the same Office system throughout. The mere possibility of doing this should be more than enough justification for most businesses evaluating Open Office.
Since I've been out working in the real world for a few years now, I've realized something that wasn't apparent to me at first: one of your dollars != one of your company's dollars. If you truly work at an organization with 100,000 employees, $6.7 million is pocket change.