OpenOffice vs. MS Office for Education?

dbrian asks: "I work in a large high school district where there will be some discussion on whether or not to purchase another term of 'Software Assurance' for MS Office licenses on thousands of computers. This seems to be an ideal opportunity to promote an alternative such as OpenOffice. It will not be an easy sell, even though OpenOffice should more than satisfy all curricular needs and save the district lots of money; like many other districts we have political and cultural 'challenges'. So, I ask you, have you been successful in moving your education or business organization from MS Office to OpenOffice? What were the pros and cons from your migration? What advice do you have in selling this to tech coordinators and administrators who are not enlightened by Open Source?"

Comments

Demo it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't you just do a demo? Call it "microsoft office" and show them the latest features. Then say "oh, by the way, this isn't microsoft office after all. It's a $300 competitor. Then say, "Oh wait. It's not $300 after all. It's free"

That way you kinda ease them into it.

Just a thought.

Re:Demo it?

[swv3752]

They will be upgrading Office regardless of whether it is MS or Open so most of your points are moot. The last one is a problem of compatibilities regardless of whether it is different versions of MS or thirdparties.

Stop being the typical MS fanboy and apologist and start being more realistic.

Re:Demo it?

[t35t0r]

1 - How much will it cost to reinstall everything? That's IT time, == $$$.

Openoffice has this thing called *network install*, once it has been installed on a main server all that is needed is to install small user files, if you can click next, next, next then you can do it in less than 10 seconds. I can install OOo on 50 computers in less than 45 mins.

2 - How much will it cost to upgrade some computers, since OOo is usually more resource-hungry than Office?

OOo can be made to load up on boot so that it loads almost as quickly as MS Office. If the computers are automatically turned on in the morniing before school starts this shouldn't be a problem even on a pentium running win95.

3 - How much will it cost in money and grief to retrain everybody (yes, there are people who just get by with Word provided you don't ever change anything to their computers).

An idiot can learn how to use Openoffice. Especially if the idiot has used MS Office. In any case school is for learning. I'm not just talking about the students either, that goes for the teachers as well.

4 - How much grief will the remaining file format incompatibilities with Office bring to the school?

I challenge you to list any format incompatibilities you may think *school* kids may come across when converting from MS Office to OOo.

Re:Demo it?

[qkslvrwolf]

Actually, we tend to prefer that people be able to use computers. You want people that can use whatever you throw at them.

So instead of teaching people "click precisely here, then here" you teach people to actually read the file menus.

It really isn't that difficult. Its all in how you explain it.

Open Office has all of the word processing features you'd need at a high school. While many of those secretaries do use things like mail merge quite effectively (which exists and is easy to use in OOo), they're not likely to be using some sort of powerful, complicated macro, which is the only reasonable reason I've seen to not switch to open office. Its like teaching someone to fish vs giving them a fish. You can just show them how to do what they want in [input specific program here], or you can teach them to read menus and dialogs and help files and cover their computing needs for life. So get used to using a computer instead of a program, grow up, join the twenty first century, and stop using the bandwagon peer-pressure approach.

It's quite simple really:

[AKAImBatman]

1. OpenOffice is free, but support may be obtained from a very popular computer company. (Sun Microsystems)
2. OpenOffice fully supports Microsoft Office file formats.
3. OpenOffice can be distributed to students without cost.
4. OpenOffice (and its sister project NeoOffice/J) run on ALL popular OSes, including Macintoshes.
5. OpenOffice is continually updated to have the latest features, again at no cost.

Re:It's quite simple really:

[lintux]

2. OpenOffice fully supports Microsoft Office file formats.

I just wish this were true... It gets close, but there are still many, many problems. :-(

Not impossible but...

[MPHellwig]

Be sure it it is indeed a viable alternative, it doesn't need to be better as long as it is good enough for that situation.

I work as an administrator/application manager at high school, the point you have to consider when trying to switch is:
Documentation, some teachers probably need to adapt their lessons, are they motivated for that and do they have the experience to make a change for them self?

Why should teachers be motivated to switch? Because it is a moral obligation for non-profit organizations to use product that are more suitable for the common good and not just profitable for a monopoly.

Education should be accessible to all layers of society, even the ones that don't have the money to buy "big bucks office".
So by using open source they aren't forced to use illegal software just to be able to get educated.

It's a straight "savings" pitch

[winkydink]

The decision-makers will be finance-oriented, not technologists. Keep the "just like MS Office" points at a high level and keep pushing how much money it will save. Worst case, MS radically discounts their sw to play for the block. With either outcome, ther's more money to spend on the students, and that is what it's really all about.

Compatibility

[ZephyrXero]

I work as sys admin at a dept. of my University. One of the teachers was having trouble getting a powerpoint to open. It seems she had used Office XP at home to create it, but for some reason Office 2003 at the school would not open it. I opened it with Open Office just fine though....problem solved.

Just because OO isn't always perfectly compatible with Office doesn't mean anything since MS Office isn't even compatible with itself sometimes...

Tough sell

[ConceptJunkie]

What advice do you have in selling this to tech coordinators and administrators who are not enlightened by
Open Source?

Short of "Don't even bother", I'd say that you have your work cut out for you. Undoubtedly these people will be familiar, even comfortable, with MS Office and you will face huge momentum because your target audience probably sees no problems with MS Office. All the benefits of OSS except price will likely fall on deaf ears, so you'd better do your homework and have a very compelling presentation.

I can't offer specifics because I'm not really familiar with OO. In my mind it is self-evident. Office sucks more ways than you can count. Period.

However, you can't make this sell by bad-mouthing Microsoft or Office. Most non-techie people won't see it that way, and in fact will probably have a high opinion of Office since it's all they know. OO can't be just "good enough" to replace Office. It has to be made clear that it is superior... and not in the ways that we computer folks tend to think, but ways that will be convincing to non-technical people. You got a "gimme" on price, but the rest will be a steep hill.

Good luck, I wish you well.

Evaluation

[davecrusoe]

The best way to determine if it's going to work for you is to set up 5-10 machines running OO and have a handful of students work with the program for a bit. Have each student complete a short survey, and you'll quickly identify who uses it best, and where the difficulties lie. Otherwise, many of our comments are heresay. Be sure to take into account all the normal uses students might want, for example: dropping images from the web into a document, printing small charts and graphs, and spellchecking. I'm sure you can think of others. Best of luck...

Re:there will be hell to pay...

[Y2]

the first 1000 times a student brings in a disk with their homework or report in a format that can't be read on the teachers' computer

Guess what?

If you're used to using other office suites - such as Microsoft Office - you'll be completely at home with OpenOffice.org 1.1. However, as you become used to OpenOffice.org 1.1, you'll start to appreciate the extras that make your life easier. You can of course continue to use your old Microsoft Office files without any problems - and if you need to exchange files with people still using Microsoft Office, that's no problem either.

http://www.openoffice.org/product/index.h tml

If the punk brings a wordstar file, to heck with him.

Re:Will it be useful?

[CheeseTroll]

I certainly hope my kids will learn more in high school than how to be good secretaries. I wrote school papers with pen/paper, and later with AppleWorks, yet I have somehow managed to move on.

Re:Will it be useful?

[idsofmarch]

Oh not this little bourbon again...a school's job is not to teach people to be little software drones, it's job is to instill critical thinking, knowledge, and ethics. Furthermore, the kid if properly taught will be able to quickly adapt to the brand-new MS Office which is somthing employers are really looking for: intelligence and adaptability. If a graduating student cannot get a job simply because he does not know Office than we should abandon the school system entirely and just simple hand-out MS manuals. There is more to knowledge than knowing how to dismiss Clippy with the right combinations.

Re:Why does everyone love Outlook so?

[thebdj]

You obviously haven't USED Outlook. Eudora is light years behind it. Eudora is closer to Outlook Express, that crappy free thing they give away to you. The only program I have used an liked outside of Outlook is Evolution which is what I tend to use in Linux.

Try really digging into Outlook and compare it to Eudora. The interface is a lot cleaner and more refined (especially in Outlooks 2003). The organization capabilities far outway Eudora. Calendar, Tasks, Notes, they all work great and if you have a Windows based PDA you HAVE to use outlook just for all the stuff you lose otherwise. As a PIM it is excellent. Eudora is far from being a true PIM since it has minimal if any real compatibility with either Palm or Outlook.

If you ask the true die hards though which program is the most powerful they'll tell you it is Lotus Notes. Having used Outlook/Exchange, GroupWise, and Lotus in business settings I will state that Lotus is the most powerful probably but it seems to diverge a bit from the norms setup by Outlook and GroupWise (that evil program from Novell).

I haven't used Eudora in ages, so feel free to enlighten me if they have actually added useable Rules, Spam Filtering, and cleaned up what was one of the worlds ugliest interfaces for a long while.

L.A. Charter School 100% OpenOffice

[CoccaNut]

I am the tech coordinator for a very well known LA Charter School. We recently completed a huge expansion project, and now have over 400 PCs on campus. Rather than paying Microsoft and other vendors thousands of dollars, we decided to transition over to a hybrid "Closed/Open Source" software model. That is, we run Windows XP (which came preinstalled on all of our machines), but primarily use F/OSS software otherwise (OpenOffice, GIMP, Anim8or, WorldWind, Celestia, etc). Doing so resulted in huge savings for the tech portion of our capital campaign, and (as others have mentioned), we're able to freely share all of our application software with our staff and students without worrying about copyright issues. It is with great rarity that anyone "complains" that we're using a non-MS office suite...

Government procurement by brand is illegal

[marbux]

You might point out that government procurement specifications may not lawfully specify software brands, but must instead be specified by standards of performance. See my article at Groklaw, section 4. The international Agreement on Government Procurement applies to all levels of government in the U.S., including school districts.

You might also discuss the legal and policy importance of procuring software using open file format standards, a subject discussed at length in the article. Microsoft Office's XML Reference Schemas, because of an overly-restrictive patent license, do not satisfy such requirements, which are critical to software interoperability in eCommerce and eGovernment. OpenOffice file formats do not suffer from that vulnerability.

There is also the important issue of vendor lock-in. OpenOffice, being cross-platform, is a giant step in the direction of freeing organizations from the necessity of using a proprietary operating system. Moreover, even should the school ultimately decide to continue using the Windows platform and Microsoft Office, it can likely receive a far lower bid from a MS Office vendor by using a specification that would allow selection of OpenOffice.

Drafting government specifications in such a way that only one vendor can supply the procured product, particularly in a time of shrinking government budgets, is wasteful and anti-competitive. You might consider developing or requesting an estimated cost comparison, using the previous MS Office licensing cost as the base. A substantial savings is likely, freeing funds for other purposes.

Re:Hard one

[WhyCause]

I used to work in the computer lab at a community college. I couldn't stand all those stupid textbooks (they don't really deserve to be called that, BTW) that "taught" the student in terms of step-by-step click at the mouse coordinates kind of lessons. Nobody actually learned anything about computers.

I used to teach computer skills at a college level (Intro to Computer-Aided Engineering), and we didn't bother with a textbook for that reason. What we did was present them with a finished product, some useful tips (e.g., Need to change font color? Look under Format...), and then turned the students loose. It was my job to assist as they worked, and generally make sure that everyone was on track. If they had questions, I would generally say something like, "I don't know, but let's see if we can find it." The fact that I, the authority figure, also had to look for things really drove home that using software is just remembering simple rules, not remembering how to do everything in every program. I even got a nomination for the department's 'Teacher of the Year' award (not that I was elligible, being a TA and all) from someone in that class.

Of course, as we got into more complicated software packages, I had to teach them the basics of programming, Finite Element Analysis, and drafting as well, but by that time, most of the students had picked up on the fact that if they looked, they would find it.