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Scottish Police Revert to Microsoft Office
LordGuha writes "The Central Scotland Policy is removing StarOffice and replacing it with Microsoft Office citing lower maintenance and running costs and greater integration with other departments. According to the article StarOffice was implemented in 2000 when the department was low in cash but lately have estimated that the Microsoft software would cost no more and lead to greater efficiencies."
The other 95% were using Microsoft Office. So that answers why they were having so much trouble with StarOffice. They weren't. They were having trouble working with everybody else using Microsoft Office.
You know, it's crazy giving cops tools like Microsoft Office or StarOffice in the first place. 99.99% of people who use word processors don't get past the part where you hit keys and watch text appear on the screen. Oh yeah, and open and save documents. That's all they ever do.
I'd bet real money that the textarea element in a browser like Firefox provides all the text-editing functionality that these people need, especially if you add spell correct via JavaScript. Hit submit and there's your save function, to a central server that can be accessed from any department. Click a link and there's your file open functionality. Amazing!
You can even do forms! LOL
Why aren't they using a system like this? Because some idiot somewhere equates more-expensive with easier-to-use. It's the oldest story in IT, and it's always a tragedy.
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Why didn't you know?
This will be a poster news for Microsoft, they go about everywhere touting this news and telling people open source/Free software are useless.
I work as a software designer for an Australian government department. They use the same sort of excuses for sticking with MS. In that case at least, it's lies. They stick with MS because it's executives that make the decisions and they get information from only two sources: MS sales staff and noisy linux zealots from within their own staff.
The zealots come off as zealots and are thus dismissed as having nothing useful to say.
The MS sales staff have "consultant" in their job title and are thus deigned (by the senior execs) to be experts on all things computerish.
Of course to those of us who grok operating environments and who don't grok executives and consultants see said executives as fools and their reasons as invalid.
Oh well.
.. this costs less, is well be cause of this:
TIME = MONEY * 3
In this sort of situation, the extra time it takes to convert documents to different formats, and keep those formats updated, totally outweighs the point of moving systems in the first place.
This should be a lesson to organisations, if you want to go open source; do it right - and change all systems at once.
I'm reminded of the "E-Learning" system at Best Buy...I think if they switched to Open Office and had a short but mandatory training module before they started working with it on how to use and convert any applicable proprietary formats to be compatible with all the Microsoft things they could save money on licensing. Unless Microsoft drops their prices WAY down for corporate customers they have plenty of money to implement an OSS solution and integrate it to be just as easy to use.
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
why it is up to openoffice to try to read microsoft's documents. you know its a free download go get it and install it so you can read the people's documents that are created in openoffice.
openoffice uses open standards for file saving and microsoft doesn't - this isn't rocket science people. just run them side by side until you totally switch to open office.
...post this on /.
It's like swearing in the church (as we in Holland use to call it). Actually, in my company I've made the same calculation. I use some program's which only work with MS Office and it would cost me more to have them rewritten then to buy the 10 licenses for ms-office. Also, the employees would have to learn openoffice/staroffice which is easily done, but the time it will take to give support for questions like "how do I change my stylesheet", "how does this work..." etc will cost me even more then the licenses alone...
First time I've ever posted here, and I really knew what to expect from this thread, but I had to say this.
We all automatically assume that the police organization doesn't know what it's doing, doesn't know how to perform cost-benefit analysis, and all are just a bunch of non-tech-savvy pawns. They made the switch to OpenOffice *5* years ago. You don't think that's enough time to give something a shot and evaluate it? You don't think that's enough time to see how much something is going to cost or impact your organization? You don't think that they had people working on it and trying to honestly switch to OSS? Unless you work there, I think your post is way out of line (as well as a lot of others in this thread).
I'm not a Microsoft apologist, but why can't you see past your own point of view? OSS isn't better just because it's free or because it's not Microsoft. Sheesh. Give these people some credit for at least trying something new.
There are still some major problems for Star Office.
First it normally defaultly saves in Star Office Format not MS Word format, yes this is an easy change but people when they are done just hit the save Icon and they are done, they don't want to go threw tens of choices and find the document that everyone else uses.
Second Individuals has invested time in MS Office. From those High School Computer Class to College Classes, CS101. The education system for computers are so dumb that they teach people how to use Microsoft Word but not a Word Processor. So almost everyone who enters the Work field know Office.
Third Speed. Open Office has had a speed problem from day 1. Yea Office isn't a speed daemon but it is fast where the users feel it is important, boot up and typing and saving.
Forth Interface. Open Office is setup with a good interface for Linux but not for Windows or Mac. This is actually very important to know the OS you are porting to and follow the OS's Interface guidelines. If you don't the application looks 3rd party and just doesn't feel right.
Fifth Work Flow. Open Offices goal is to create all the functionality and compatibility of Office but it forgot to get the work flow. Watch a non technical person use Office and you will see that their ways of solving problems may surprise you. They avoid using Style Sheets and just go for the Font Drop Down, except for hitting tab they will use the space and they never ever use hot keys for anything. The menus are off limit to them (The same with the windows start button) If they don't see it it must be an advanced feature that they shouldn't use.
Open Office is good for techs but not for normal people
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"and the need to interoperate more smoothly with other departments running Windows."
Aka, dominance brings it own appeal.
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I'll probably get strung up on a length of Cat5 by enraged slashdotters for writing this, but there's a reason why people who have used MS Office products tend to continue using them: they're well-designed, and they work well enough for most purposes. I'm not talking about accountants and actuaries who try to shoehorn Excel + VB macros into acting like a Real Programming Language for financial calculations, but the mere fact that you have fax templates, that you can copy and paste easily from one app to another, and that you can run a decent little database using Access if you want. That as a manager running an office, you can put "skilled with MS Office applications" in a job ad for a secretary and find someone who can at least click through menus and generate the documents you need. That the applications look professional and clean and they come with a support number for a company that will not go out of business anytime soon. That the company will at least attempt to help you fix your problems and whom you can blame if something goes horribly wrong. ("It's not my fault, it's that damn Microsoft app!" you say to your VP who's pissed at the monthly reports being late again.)
OpenOffice is pretty good, and I use it exclusively on my work laptop running Ubuntu, but my choice in running Linux and other open-source applications is all about my freedom to use, redistribute and modify the application as I see fit, unencumbered by restrictive EULAs and software patents and all the baggage that goes along with shrink-wrapped commercial software. I'm willing to take the time and effort necessary to re-learn how to copy formulas instead of values in a spreadsheet app, where the default save locations live in the word processing app, and how to turn off the @#$(*! assistant. Most people don't care that much, and are willing to spend the money to use something they're familiar with and that is a de facto standard instead of taking the harder path. And don't get me wrong, it is harder to use even something as pretty and polished as Ubuntu + OpenOffice for a user familiar with Microsoft products, although it's a damn sight easier than it was 5 years ago.
Most people are lazy, and want to get things done as simply as possible. Big software companies take advantage of that, both at a personal and a corporate level. There's a reason why Microsoft is the gigantic software behemoth that it is, and that's because it understands this and understands how to sell products to individuals and organizations. That doesn't mean that its software is technologically superior, or more fun to hack on, or more free to use; but it makes people buy more stuff from them.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
You need to be a large organization, and threaten to move to OSS (or have already done so).
Then you get a killer deal - for a few years. Let's see 3 years from now what the yearly cost is after that. Maybe 200$/seat. Or more. But hey, at that point people calculate that moving (back) to OSS is (slightly) more expensive than paying MS again for another contract.
Free/cheap samples or initial contracts are nice way to milk a customer to max later on. MS can think long-term - they are willing to dump some short-term profits for long term wins. They'll milk the difference back over the next 10-15 years - probably several times over.
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
Well, I doubt anyone will jump from StarOffice (read: commercial and with some level of support) past OpenOffice to run their police department on a beta OpenOffice version. Granted, it's getting there but it's not released yet. OpenOffice 1.x got a foot in the door, but it takes more to outdo MS Office, which is in fact quite polished.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Having worn both hats, geek and suit, I have to say you can't make this kind of decision purely on technical OR non-technical criteria. You have to use all your knowledge to do what's best for the organization.
Personally, I'd have taken this deal if I were the IT director, and I'm borderline Linux zealot. You take Ceasars salt, you do Ceasars bidding -- and if crucifiction doesn't appela to you, you look after his interests. MS offered them a deal that's a no-brainer. Just do the math.
They have about 1000 officers plus support staff. Don't know how many licenses this is but MS offered them a package deal at £60,000, which divided by the staff works out to £60/body/year. So it's as close to free beer as makes no difference, especially if this saves a staff position a year dealing with the fact nearly everyone else uses MS. Let's say that financially, it's the same as getting the software for free.
Add to this that the deal includes software they need to comply with legal requirements, software they estimate they'd have paid £100,000 to build custom, and now they're far ahead. It's the same old story, fortunately less common today than a few years ago: the app I need isn't available on Linux. In a couple of years when the deal runs out, the free alternatives will have closed the gap more, either forcing the market price of MS software down, or making it even more feasible to switch over if that really makes sense.
From MS's standpoint, this is very smart move. This deal is exactly what I'd have offered. MS wasn't making any dough from these guys anyways, an since its marginal cost for duplicating the software is nil, the limitation on dropping their price is that they don't want to encourage people to switch just to get the deal. That level is probably close to zero at this point in time: for most organizations, the TCO savings of F/OSS isn't attractive enough to switch once the you factor in sunk costs, conversion/training costs, and short term opportunity costs.
So, MS walks away with 60K in their pocket per year, which is not much but it is better than zero. They also get the priceless publicity of a high profile organization going F/OSS and giving up.
It's a natural and, unfortunately, effective competitive strategy in a business where the marginal cost of a product is zero. I expect that as Linux and OpenOffice get better and better we'll be hearing a lot more stories like this.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I typically install LAMP even on desktops so webapps can be run locally. The browser is just another GUI.
There is no way that other OS should be mentioned on the same page as Linux for web services. Linux wins hands down.
The folks locked into that other OS are to be pitied. It is not that Windows is wonderful, but that they have been allowed to establish and maintain a monopoly by illegal means. If they were so good they would not have to use illegal means. Look at the "final agreement". They are allowed to set quotas to distributors at the 50% level and servers aren't even covered. They are allowed to punish distributors that ship PCs without Windows. What a sham when DOJ helps the criminals in their wrongdoing.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
Microsoft historically has gone for the easy way out by hiding the complicated functions below a pretty "Click 'OK' to automatically install and configure your firewall" MessageBox, which is fine if you're writing a document, but not so good if you need to tweak out your server for maximum functionality and security.
You can see this mentality in everything they do. From Visual Studio with it's horrible automatically-generated code, to their AD permissions 'wizard', they are all about one thing: selling widgets. And the number one rule is selling a mass-market product requires convenience over functionality or security.
LAMP is built for the do-it-yourself/tinkerer crowd, and therefore the average person will never be able to install, configure, or maintain a LAMP environment or application.
Yeah, right.
I'm not impressed.
Really, you could automate that much better using web forms.
If you have to do a mailmerge in word everytime you want to send something out, you're just wasting taxpayers' money.
You're blaming grandparent for not knowing what he is talking about, but what do you mean with :
"They also have to save that form data, which could not be done with a web form..."
Can you kindly explain what's the point of filling out a webform wich can't be saved ?
--> Insert Funny Sig Here
Well, I work IT in a law enforcement agency, and so I can speak to that. The parent is right, you don't know what the Hell you're talking about.
Police use Word to fill in reports, forms, etc. that could definitely not be formatted using Wordpad. They also have to save that form data, which could not be done with a web form or Acrobat Reader.
This would be trivial to do with a web based application.
They also use Word to interact with Excel and Access databases. When you're sending out a notification letter to 180 victims in a given county, you better believe it's a helluva lot easier to use Word's mail merge than typing each name individually in Wordpad.
This would not only be trivial to do with a web application, it would be better suited as a web application.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Trust me, the police not only use Word, but a whole bunch of other software as well. And you should be glad they do.
Trust me, I'm a carpenter, and you definatly need wood, hammer and nails to fix this problem.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
:)
I'm late to the thread here, but it seems that most people with the 'OpenOffice is nearly there' argument haven't really seen MS Office being used in medium to large organizations.
The MS Office integration with the network system (AD/Exchange) and now Sharepoint make the technical menu imitations of OpenOffice nearly irrelevant.
From a website, I can click a button, open a spreadsheet *in the browser* (not a full browser takeover, just embedded in part of the web page), make changes/updates, then save the document, and it'll save back on the network drive (or wherever it came from) seamlessly. If live realtime document collaboration of any Office doc was able to be embedded in IE already, I wouldn't be surprised.
MS has moved beyond the reach of OpenOffice for the next few years because they've taken multi-domain integration to the next stage, way ahead of the fragmentation that exists (almost by definition) in the open source world.
I'm writing this as someone who has pretty much used LAMP for about 9 years, and uses Linux on my desktop daily for the past 3.
Now, if someone was to take the novell openexchange system and define new protocols such that Firefox/Mozilla could do realtime openoffice document embedding and communication with the openexchange server, throwing in an embedded gaim client using a jabber protocol for good measure, and made this cross platform, that would be a serious contender. I'm afraid that won't happen for a few years, until a bunch of OSS developers get a glimpse of what's going on in the corporate world. Unfortunately, that may *never* happen, as many of them wouldn't get hired in the first place.
In short, Microsoft is staying ahead of the competition now by offering extremely tight integration among their core products, and it's only going to continue to go down that path. Not saying it's a bad thing - it's really the only way they *can* go, and I think it'll serve them well easily for another 3-5 years. That's about as far as I'll make predictions.
creation science book
I'll do you one better. Not only am I a cop, but I work in the IT field as well. There's nothing that couldn't be handled using a web forms application, and better than what you can do with any office suite.
On the topic of software used by police departments, I think some of it has purpose. Training tracking is good, and e-mail is a good tool for inter- and intradepartment memos. If you can't find a better way to do mass mailings other than Word's mail merge, then you need to go back to school. As for Excel and Access databases, please. MySql is a database. SqlServer is a databse. Postgres is a database. Access is a really fancy spreadsheet, and is absolute crap. Please don't give it any credentials by calling it a database.
Ultimately, from the look of things, you have zero real experience in IT, and need to go spend some time in large scale corporate IT. Once you've done that, take your lessons learned, and apply them to the small scale you're currently working with.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
/. is really circling the drain regarding enlightned debate.
/. orthodoxy.
It is so tiresome to see everybody screaming about OSS providing freedom to choose software tools - but it is only good when the choice is excersized in favour of Linux. The instant a choice is made to MS (god forbid) the hue and cry appears condemning those regressive bastards as idiots or dupes.
Don't offer choice if you are pushing an agenda. It is their choice, they tried something different - and it did not work out for them. Lets stop getting the knickers in a twist simply because someone went against the
Oh, don't be such a prat.
Yes, yes, your has been modded funny, but I'd like to make a few points.
The police department in question needs to exchange data with other departments. These departments are largely using Microsoft Office.
"They only need a text editor with spell check" claims are, to be kind, absurd and ignorant. At the very least they most likely have a host of templates for document creation. I've had some experience with what happens when documents get mangled by changes to the underlying template. Given what I've seen of moving text boxes and munged tables, template problems could easily do things like switch the name of the victim and the suspect, depending on the template.
They cited costs as a major concern. I'm sure Microsoft gave them some deep discounts in this situation. Hell, they might even be losing money on this, but being able to use this as a case study for their advertising is worth losing some coin. It could very well be far cheaper to go back to Microsoft than to stick with StarOffice.
Remember, this is about StarOffice, NOT OpenOffice. The cost of the software itself was not Zero plus download time.
If you take into account having to maintain a library of duplicate templates, document exchange headaches, cleaning up cases where one application totally screwed over a file created in the other office suite and he cost of having to maintain a separate support staff, switching to MS Office suddenly makes a lot of sense. I'm sure a lot of support staff are going to be let go after they switch back.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
which is the reverse of normal events, ergo it makes the news. Dittos for the Scottish police wp change.
Because so many people and businesses are converting to Linux and FOSS it's not news any more, so stories about that movment are rarely published anymore.
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per capita death rates of Americans in DC and LA are greater than American soldier combat deaths in Iraq, so when are we pulling out of DC or LA?
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I am a Linux/Unix admin professionaly and I recently went from OpenOffice back to MS-Office. [...] My CV kept causing everyone elses Word to crash, thats a cost I couldn't afford to pay as a jobseeker.
Professional Linux/UNIX admins would send their resume in PDF, ASCII, or HTML format. Furthermore, no company minimally concerned about security would open resumes sent to them in DOC format because of security concerns. And if a company insists on something they can open in Word, you can always send them RTF. To me, you sound like you are either making this up, or you are simply not very experienced.
Incidentally, Microsoft Word can crash even on opening Microsoft Word documents, depending on the versions involved. That's another reason not to use Word for resumes.
We've used several "office" applications here in schools and I must say this:
Staroffice was terrible when we brought it in. Hard to use, with incompatability errors and a generally unpleasant interface. For quite awhile it propogated a mindset that anything that wasn't MS Office was frightening
Openoffice.org on the other hand (and perhaps more modern StarOffice versions), is very nice, better interface, decent (and improving) compatability, etc. Kids picked up Impress faster that I have, and design some *very* kickass presentations with it. The built-in PDF export facility from the document editors is nice too...
For those that prefer a slightly nicer interface than OO, depending on your version I've found quite a few people enjoyed Abiword as a replacement for the just word component of office.
Seriously, even as an OSS advocate I really disliked StarOffice, but there were/are better alternatives out there.
You sound like someone who's never had to look for a job.
You're a suburbanite.
I'm holding you to this one:
What's a better way to do mass mailings other than Word's mail merge? Seriously, what is your happy easy solution that's better and everybody loves it?
And in what way is Access NOT a database? Do you even know what the word "database" means? Hell, Access wouldn't even have to be relational to be a database. (It is relational; but that's not required to be a DB.)
Sure you're a cop and you work in the IT field, but you're also a open source zealot and it shows.
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Maybe, but that doesn't mean OpenOffice doesn't suck. Even the brain-dead can learn to drive a Geo Metro, but Geo Metros still suck. Understand now? Gooood.
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