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Dutch City Of Haarlem Takes Up OpenOffice.org
zerdood writes "An article in IDA states that Haarlem, the capitol of North Holland, has succeeded in converting 2000 desktops to use OpenOffice.org. They initiated the migration in response to the 500,000 Euro licensing fees paid every year to Microsoft for an upgrade from Office '97. Training people to use OpenOffice.org is projected to cost about one tenth of that. Jan van de Straat, director of R&D for the city, has also stated that they could move up to 20% of the city's desktops to Linux without any problems. Their servers already use Penguin Power."
hopefully the 25% prediction will come true. In US there is no chance in near future because any attempts made by the fed govt or state govt to recomend oss is shot down by the M$ lobyist.
Calm down people, its a religion not an operating system.
Dutch-land, like a Christmas tree Tonight this city belongs to me Angel... Angel of Haarlem
Phone companies:
Standardisation of networks and huge expansion of market will lead to network commodotisation and things such as voice calls will loose significant revenue.
OS companies (Microsoft):
Home and office users with a standardised hardware and software requirements make generic PC and office suites a commodity.
Specialised software still has clout.
Dear Haarlem,
Haven't you heared that OSS virus software has a greater TOC than our l33t war3z? Save money now and buy our XP w4r3z, plus get a free college education at a uni of ur choice for ur loved on3z.
urs,
Bill
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It's encouraging to see a story about someone who has actually made the switch to some sort of OSS as opposed to someone talking about it. I don't mean to imply that the other places considering the switch were insincere, but it's a lot easier to take seriously when you've eliminated the possibility that it was just a stunt to get reduced prices on MS Office. Nice work, Haarlem!
It looks like they are taking a sensible migration path.
:)
:)
:) ) and it is good to see Microsoft Office alternatives given a chance.
Adopting a new product (OOo) as the new standard, training people to use it and then insisting it be used for new work is the way to go.
Since they already have licensed copies of Office97, there is no cost involved in keeping it alongside to run legacy apps and handle legacy documentation.
Sending documents for other people to view can always be done by creating PDFs of them. This is the main way we do it and find that most people can read them regardless of platform. I can even read them on my telephone
The next step on migration would be to divert some of the cash that would have been spent on the upgrade to porting the legacy apps to use OOo. Even if this took the whole upgrade budget, in the medium to long run they will still benefit greatly.
Where there are people who cannot cope with PDF, or a PDF isn't adequate (i.e. they need an active spreadsheet) then encourage people to get OOo. The price is right
In the case of suppliers, then you tell them they have to use it. I doubt there will be any contractual issues regarding this - I've yet to see a contract that said 'all invoice to be submitted in Word97' or somesuch:) If they want your money, this is a minimal cost (and ultimately a saving) for them.
For other people, there can be problems, but even then how different are they to upgrading to a new version of Office? I remember incompatabilities between versions and having to save documents as Word 2.0 format, etc. OOo does produce passably decent Office code that is probably no waorse than those cases.
OOo is freely distributable. CD-Rs are cheap. Burn a few copies to give to these people. If you have an organisation of a few thousand (as many govt organs will), then you will have a tech support department. Give a few of these valued people access to your tech support for OOo issues. It won't cost anything extra in most cases.
While I write software commercially for a living, I also find advantage in OpenSource. Companies like Microsoft have, either by design or accident, gained a strong monopoly and thus have a stranglehold over us. For a piece of software that has become a 'standard', its cost is just too high for most people to afford. How many pirate copies because of this? How many feel justified in doing so? How many would agree with them?
Whatever the 'rights' or 'wrongs' of the situation, no commercial product should be in such a monopoly position (unless its mine and I get all the dosh, of course
Open Standards are well worth encouraging.
Their adoption gives everyone a chance to get the service level they require. Free software can be written in the knowledge that it will interact with commercial software. Commercial software can be written to give the slick finish and support that the corporate or nervous user craves.
If an organisation as large as the collective EU were to take the open standard/OSS route, all compainies like Microsoft could do was jump on the bandwagon to compete on a more equal playing field.
Open-source is a good and noble cause but nobody is going to win the war for open computing based on GNU/Zealotry alone. It plays an important role but even more important are standards that let all members work on equal footing.
For example, Safari is not purely open-source but it has foundations there and on the whole is very friendly to the standards. In the grand scheme of having a better, more open Internet, another Safari is just as good for us all as another Firefox user. (Here, for the sake of honesty, I admit I'm a rabid Apple fan, though Mozilla is actually my primary browser.)
In short, it's not about the license as much as it is the standards (or lack thereof) that the software supports.
The joke is in the subject. It's pretty bad.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
My company (a major software company featured often here on slashdot) has pushed a major OpenOffice initiative internally.
.doc transperancy has to get much better. OO needs to be able to function near flawlessly with .doc files, and not complain about saving files in .doc.
.doc and .sxw are pure garbage when OO tries to convert them, and that is a complete show-stopper.
The major challange remains interoperation with Word, and to a lesser degree, PowerPoint. Although internally this is survivable, when we have to share documents with customers (which is nearly every document in my case), OpenOffice is a major hassle.
Some of our customers are enthusased and willing to get with OO just to work with us, but the vast majority at this point still do not care (or have heard of) OO and we look like fools trying to explain they need to install a new office suite to view our report.
Built-in PDF export is definitly a bonus, but the read-only nature doesn't solve the problem.
Today, most of the complex documents I have in both
It's getting better with each release, but it still has a long, long way to go.
This isn't rocket science; Microsoft did the exact same thing to Lotus in order to crush the 1-2-3 market.
Example:
How do you remove a hyperlink in word? Right-click on the 'link, click on "remove hyperlink" How do you remove a hyperlink in OO? Click on the format menu, click on "default" WTF???!!Yeah, right.
then saving the money and going to OOo is a smart move.
If they had already been using Office XP or 2003 I would imagine there'd be some resistance from the users.
As good as OOo is, MS is still one or two steps ahead. (I use both, all the way back to the StarOffice 5.x days, and Microsoft Office is just more polished IMO all the way around...)
Every now and then I toy with rolling out OOo at the school where I work, but until I can install it via GPO and it is more "network/user" aware I'm going to wait. I hear the 2.0 version will have this.
Todd
Whoohoo, makes me proud I was born there :-)
Haarlem has almost 150000 inhabitants so they save 3 euro per tax payer. Not bad.
There is a project going somewhere to implement an exact match for the Word desktop. (Don't ask me where...) This can be done using the UNO interface (like the built in basic) and a little programming. It is definitely NOT a strategic direction of OpenOffice.org. If you wish this then please get involved and help, OOo will MS theme but it will never be installed by default, possibly not even in the official tarball for legal reasons. OOo will actively assist anyone who wants to get this working and OOo will publicise a MS theme should one become available.
OOo does not want to be hampered by the poor decisions that Microsoft has made in interface design over the years. We want to consider each change on it's merits not because 'we say so' corp does it that way.
OpenOffice.org is not trailing MS Word, it aim to be better. The leader and innovator, for example PDF export.
If OOo ever did implement MS Word's interface exactly I can imagine the advertising now. Open Source is just following the leader. We would play into their hands.
So it is not a strategic direction of OOO to use the interface standards of the market, right? Please allow me to quote from "User Interface Design for Programmers" (APress, 2001):
I'm guessing you're thinking Billg is the Evil Smurf, right?
I thought so. That's not the point. The point is most of your potential customers think that is the way an office suite should behave. By intentionally doing things differently, you're telling them, "You're too stupid to use our program, so either learn how or stick with what you got." That's exactly what they'll do.
Beta was better than VHS, but guess who won, the one with the better product or the one who got the most people to use it?
Better, instead, to be a niche program, used by less than one percent of the office-suite-using public, because the learning curve is too high.
Legal reasons like Apple v. Microsoft? That whole part about how look and feel can't be copyrighted because it is made of non-copyrightable elements, like menus and buttons? That one?
I must respectfully decline. I would rather not devote my time to a project in which the average user was so obviously considered
Yeah, right.
However, as geg81 and others have pointed out, many OOo users are new users. They don't need the baggage of legacy software. Even if the users aren't so new, this is a chance to get things right, or at least better.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.