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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.'"
As a student who has switched to OO.org I have not had one problem with the word processing I do. Granted this isn't anything with insane layout requirements. I am able to export to word format to send email to friends who proof-read and open theirs when it's my turn. I don't use speadsheets to much but everything is simple enough for what I'm doing, I haven't tried to go back and forth from excel however.
The thing I love best is the built in PDF exporter, makes it so much easier to send out documents I don't want altered other then at the mester-copy.(Eg, they can't just fire up Word and type away) That's just me being picky though.
I haven't had a problem with it at all in practical use, but I'm hardly a power-user when it comes to office suites.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
I'm a GUI/Usability guy, so this is my professional ability to play "dumb user" speaking:
The ZIP I downloaded had a cryptic name "OO_...something..." with lots of letters and numbers. The zip took a long time to download, so when I later saw this file on my desktop I didn't know what it was. This was confusing, it should say something "OpenOffice.zip" or better yet "OpenOffice.EXE".
I opened the zip (would "dumb user" even have WinZip on their system, or know how to use it?) -- the zip contained dozens of weirdly named files, and at the very bottom of the list I found a setup.exe. I ran the setup exe, and from this point on the installation process was clean and simple.
The file I download should have been as small an EXE as possible -- perhaps a small simple app that downloads the big file for you in a friendly way.
Luring new users over from the dark (MS) side is like trying to get a tiny squirrel to take a peanut from your hand. Any weird gestures and they'll bolt. I'm afraid the big download, weirdly named zip, and the hunt for the setup.exe would likley have caused the timid squirrel to run away.
Then I went to launch the app, and the icons in the OpenOffice folder on the Start menu confused me. I could not find an icon with a blue W representing the word processor, so after a moment of confusion I tried clicking on "Open Document" which let me browse to my *.doc -- whew it worked, but "dumb user" wasn't sure he was doing the right thing, and almost didn't bother to try.
The doc file opened easily, the Word Processor is pretty and obviously very mature and full-functioned. I could read and print (!) my doc easily with no trouble at all. Very nice.
The BIG POINT HERE is Sun needs to do their best to improve the initial download/install experience to ensure switchers don't get confused. Also, emulate everything MS does so MS Office users do not have to stray from their pre-conditioned clicking behavious; you will loose new users at the first moment of confusion. A "Blue W " icon needs to represent the Word Processor, a "Green X" icon for the Spreadsheet.
Hope this helps, looks like a good product, really.
Sam