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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 $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice. After several surprising developments, including OpenOffice's ability to open old Word documents that even the new Word versions were having troubles with, the school now uses it almost exclusively, has classes on it's use, and encourages students to use it whenever possible. From the article: 'While OpenOffice.org is now used by 100% of the faculty and students in the school (though some administrative staff still uses Microsoft Office due to specific software requirements), students are not required to use OpenOffice.org when working at home. However, a presentation is given to students at the start of every school year to advise them on the use of OpenOffice.org, the availability of free copies, and potential problems of converting from Microsoft Office formats.'"
This study was obviously funded by Open Office and Linux. I am so sick of Linux and Open Office "buying" the results that show their products are better than Microsoft's. This report is so slanted in its analysis that I can't even begin to chip away at all of the errors.
And yes, I do think I'm funny.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
So it seems that the same thing that happened to propritary unix apps in the 80s and 90s is starting to happen now with propritary consumer apps. I'm refering to the stories of upon setting up their workstation or server taking a day to replace all the proprietary programs with the GNU created ones because they functioned better.
From TFS:
This sums it up so well...
Actually, has anyone out there run into any issues with OpenOffice as a substitute for M$ Office? I'm considering switching everything over, especially after reading this article.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Yea, but none of my Anti-Virus programs run on Linux.
How long will it be until Microsoft comes in with some "free" software to bring them back into the fold? There were several schools around my area that received free software from Microsoft when they considered going open source.
"In 2003, the school, who saved over $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice."
I hope the school teaches students that "who" is a pronoun that references people. "School" is a noun properly referenced by the pronoun "that" or "which" (in this case, "which"). Choosing "that" or "which" properly can require some fast thinking, but using "who" for a school is a real failure.
--
make install -not war
since microsoft office is a stagnant target (not too many innovations left to be made in word and excel), it is only a matter of time for openoffice to catch up - with the huge base of motivated programmers, they may even surpass ms office.
The school "has classes on it's use."
Presumably they also have classes on the use of the apostrophe. (Sigh.)
In particular you can get McCafee AV for Linux.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Over the many years (begining in the late 80s) most of my sources of pirated software has been from academic sources -- mostly teachers.
Knowing that as a high school / college student I could not afford the software, it's use was generously "loaned" to me. (I also had to borrow computers -- could not afford one of my own until a college loan specific for building one came along).
But with educational institutions very worried these days about piracy, having truley free software of good quality is the way to lessen piracy in the schools.
OpenOffice.org is a great suite, and has many things going for it that just makes sense, such as it being open source, free to distribute, and cross-platform, just about any student should be able to use it.
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Spellbound is your friend. A forms spell checking extension for Mozzy/FF.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
... and I'm glad the kids like it, but I won't even think about switching until it has a wonderful, cheerful, dancing paperclip to brighten up my day.
I don't see why these kids need openoffice. When I was a kid, nroff and troff were good enough for us, and I think it should be good enough for these kids nowadays. They're all soft. No wonder our education system is in the tank!
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
Anyone know? Do they have plans to? I think it's only fair that if a free application saved them tons of money the school pay back at least part of the cost saved.
Yeah, you've missed it -- they do that all* the time.
It usually looks something like "(Disclaimer: Slashdot and Newsforge are both owned by OSTG)"
*AFAIK
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Damn...who'da thought Detroit would ever be at the forefront of ANYTHING ever again?
When their numbers dwindled from 50 to 8, the dwarves began to suspect Hungry.
Plan:
f ice_org_2_x.html
March 2005: OOo 2.0 Beta
May 2005 : OOo 2.0 changes will be done on separated branch, the trunk (HEAD) will then be used for the next OOo major (3.0 ?) release.
May 2005: OOo 2.0 rc
June 2005 : OOo 2.0
Q3 2005: OOo 2.0.1
taken from:
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/OpenOf
thereby readying their students to compete for those coveted administrative assistant positions.
If for nothing else, the school can , for less than one percent of the MS license fees, have OOo printed to CDs for every student, no more labs full of students working furiously in the labs at 7AM as we had in our HS because so many could not afford Office and didnt want/know how to "aquier" it. We that had it shared the wealth, but a lot of people saw it as theft, I saw it as needing to get my homework done.
Younger computer users are naturally more adaptive while adults are more set in their ways. I do acknowledge that there were some adults (teachers, administrators) who succeeded in this study. Still, could I teach all the "old dogs" at my workplace the "new tricks" of Linux and OpenOffice?
I know you're trying to be funny, but in my opinion (and I think in the opinion of a lot of other people here on /.) there is nothing worse than someone who learns computers by memorizing. It is far better for someone to learn the concepts of software and be able to apply them everywhere. Even if they go on to work in positions where OO.o is not used, they will probably begin to see the concepts and become better computer users as a result.
So while this statistically invalid survey suggests they don't do it "all the time", I have missed 'em, so thanx for the pointer mrchaotica which motivated me to do some quick research.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
If you show a cost savings they stop giving you funding because you've shown you can operate on a leaner budget.
Yes, that's true. However, if someone in charge decides they can save 100,000$ in software, and put that money into books or teacher salaries (or an additional hire) instead, then this is a net benefit to the school without their funding being reduced.
They need to start using XP and Office, and run up their support bills.
It bothers me that you're advocating a publicly-funding institute wasting money. And we wonder why our governments mis-manage funds? It's in large part due to that kind of thinking. No, I would rather that the school not waste money, and that the savings go into other school programs, or even into other schools, or even into other sectors of the government that need funding (of which there are many).
If I was the schools administrator I'd avoid anything with the word "free" in it like the plague.
I truly hope most school administrators are not like you. Avoiding things that are "free" because that might reduce your budget for next year? What's the point of having a big budget if you're forced to waste it? I would much prefer that those in charge of spending my tax dollars do the right thing and spend my money intelligently.
- 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!).Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
It costs the school $0 [extra], because chances are they replaced the class that would have tought the kids MS Office.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Two sides to that coin, however. Where I work, I was put in the position of doing the technical background work of a briefing for a visit by a certain high-ranking General. I get called on to do this from time to time, and it basically consists of me sitting at the briefing room computer, reading a book, and advancing PowerPoint slides at the appropriate times.
On this occasion, however, when the PowerPoint presentation was given to me (about 30 minutes beforehand), I was quite disconcerted to see that the act of merely opening the file quite rudely caused PowerPoint to crash compeletely on every single computer I tried it on (nonsensical as it sounds, it seems as if the problem was an issue with there being some speech recognition program on the computer it was originally created on that it wasn't able to find on our computers, or something; the error message wasn't very helpful).
Anyways, 5 minutes before the General arrives, I dash across the building to my workspace and, in a final, fleeting effort, stuff the thumbdrive into my Linux box. I mount it, fire up openoffice.org, open the file, and behold! Nary a glitch--and certainly not a crash! Click "Save", run back, and ta-da! General waltzes in and gives his briefing, oblivious to any trouble, and I sit back and smugly read my book.
It was the staff who converted -- and (to their surprise) found that it was way better than they expected. Learning curve for the staff is quite relevant, since they all probably knew MS Office before hand.
On the other hand, you still have a learning curve for every new version of MS Office too... Probably about as much as the difference between MS and Open..
and kept MS Office for some of the administration stuff, probably because they couldn't afford not openning certain documents.
MS Office couldn't open some MS office documents, and OO couldn't open some MS Office documents -- so overall, I'd say we're about equal here.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
No, really... they do it all the time.
OOo is quite similar to Office, and I doubt most people will find the differences to matter in business. Frankly, if students do learn these differences and are able to adapt to Office, then they will be ahead of the tech curve by knowing more than one interface and thus being able to generalize, making them more effective at learning new features/programs rather than being paralyzed by change. It is the fear of something different that makes OOo and other MS alternatives unacceptable, not any practical business or money-making rational.
I don't know a single person I'd call technically competent who is only able to use one word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, CAD tool, whatever to the exclusion of all others. The tech curve is not static, and knowing one thing (even if it is the most popular) is to handicap yourself when that curve moves beyond what you know.
MS Tax or no, I consider this to be doing the students a favor.
The enemies of Democracy are
This is going to be a typical scene of geek masturbation, with a single common theme in mind: It worked for me, therefore it must be perfect for everyone in the world
Wow how is that precognition going? This thread is already several hundred posts long and I haven't seen anyone (aside from you) voice that assertion. This is a typical straw man argument, ...weak.
One of the best quotes I've ever seen on the whole OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office debate:
The latter subject inspired his latest work, a fully checked formal proof of the famous Four Colour Theorem, using the Coq proof assistant developed at INRIA
Well according to the above quote from the Microsoft page - the software that actually did the proof came from a publically funded research institute not Microsoft - who merely applied it to the 4-colour problem. Both researchers appear to work at INRIA (French national institute of research in computer science) and one of them is associated with Microsoft.
Just the facts ma'am - just the facts...
99% of my use of MS word is as a spell checker, I'll type a comment (like this one) on a web form then quickly copy and paste in to word and back for spellchecking goodness.
Some OSes have builtin systemwide spell checkers. This is something I've dreamed of for years. For my webbrowser under OSX all I had to do is right click on this text dialog box, and enable spell checking as I type. Its cool, I put words anywhere (like the Google search bar) I feel like and right click on them to get the correct spelling all the time. Also other benefits of having a systemwide spell checker is that the words that you add the dictionary are universally available to all apps, and the spell checker is consistent between apps.
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
Yes! The language setting is terrible. Things that need improvement:
1) Put the setting somewhere else. There is no logical connection to the font dialog it's controlled in right now. Put it in the context menu, at the very least - although the context menu already is fairly crowded because pretty much everything is controllable from it.
2) Have a means to reduce the number of possible languages. As it is, you have to wade through every imaginable language when typically you only use a few languages in your life, and often only one or two in a single document. I can't stress enough how annoying that is.
3) Preferably, have a way to auto-detect the language I use. I think MS Word does that. If 8 out of 10 words in a paragraph are misspelt in the current language, and there exists a dictionary associated with another language where only 1 out of 10 os misspelt, switch that paragraph to the other language. Alternatively, ask me whether to switch, or make it extremely convenient to switch. Have a preference panel to control this behaviour.
4) Keep the setting when I create a new paragraph or slide.
In a related vein, OOo doesn't "ship" with a thesaurus for British English, I think. It does ship with one for AE. Obviously, nearly everything that applies to the AE thesaurus also would apply to the BE thesaurus. The same is true within most other dialect groups - a thesaurus for German would also be applicable to a text written in German (Switzerland). There is no functionality to that degree as it is - if you write a text set to be English (Great Britain), there is no thesaurus function available. The whole design of treating dialects as seperate entities with no relationship to each other is just way off and has a lot of unwanted consequences. It'd make more sense to have a language/dialect tree.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Most of the time I'm sending them PDF's by posting them on the web server, which is as easy as saving them to a network folder, which I do right from OO. And I really like being able to use the same application on Windows or Linux.
I've also known some small offices that have switched over, very few problems. All those FUD talking points MSFT uses are absolute crap. There is no massive learning curve or training costs and anyone who can open a PDF can read what you create.
A $100,000 to a school district is a lot of money. That could pay for an after school program for a whole year, equipment for a sports program, an extra teacher. Even if OO was a vastly inferior product, which it's not IMHO, it would seem like the things you could do with the money in a school far outweigh having the latest and greatest software.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
We should be wanting a system-wide grammar checker too.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
For my webbrowser under OSX all I had to do is right click on this text dialog box, and enable spell checking as I type.
[mac user]
What's this "right-click" you speak of?
[/mac user]
You realy mean you use LaTeX for important documents?
You let someone else write your formatting macros for you?
You don't even write your own TeX output routine?
You don't use \shipout to have real control on how your document's pages realy look?
By using preinstalled macros collections such as LaTeX instead of TeX primitives you are giving up some of your freedom!