2-Year OpenOffice High School Case Study

Michael writes "NewsForge (a Slashdot sister site) is carrying a 2-year OpenOffice case-study on a Detroit high school who switched from Windows NT and MS Office 97 to Linux and OpenOffice. The results? Better than expected. In 2003, the school, who saved over $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice. After several surprising developments, including OpenOffice's ability to open old Word documents that even the new Word versions were having troubles with, the school now uses it almost exclusively, has classes on it's use, and encourages students to use it whenever possible. From the article: 'While OpenOffice.org is now used by 100% of the faculty and students in the school (though some administrative staff still uses Microsoft Office due to specific software requirements), students are not required to use OpenOffice.org when working at home. However, a presentation is given to students at the start of every school year to advise them on the use of OpenOffice.org, the availability of free copies, and potential problems of converting from Microsoft Office formats.'"

Comments

Excellent to see...

[kukickface]

that linux can operate effectively in an environment of old hardware and yesterday's problems. Why is this news worthy? People don't understand how the government works. If you show a cost savings they stop giving you funding because you've shown you can operate on a leaner budget. They need to start using XP and Office, and run up their support bills. If I was the schools administrator I'd avoid anything with the word "free" in it like the plague.

Re:They missed the hidden costs

[geekee]

" Like:

* how much more postage is going to cost them because secretarial staff can now write more letters per day? Things like this add up and can cost big money that isn't represented in this report.
* Not having to retype old documents means that staff can afford to take more breaks -- That's Lost productive time that I don't see taken into account.

There's lots more, but I have to go to the beach (to get my hair cut -- honest!)."

For something to be funny it should have some basis in truth. You live in a fantasy world if you think OO is better software than MS Office that will magically make people more productive.