Slashdot Mirror
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 key question is, did their temporary move put enough pressure on Microsoft to get them a cheaper deal for Office? In which case, it's worth moving to OpenOffice even if you intend to move back...
Xenu loves you!
I think you need to look further than initial purchase cost.
.doc format sitting right here to prove you wrong.
If you RTFA, there's a very telling sentence:
Early this year, however, the agency reviewed its IT infrastructure as part of an effort to meet performance targets, comply with Scotland's Freedom of Information Act and work more closely with other law enforcement groups
OpenOffice is fine if all you're doing is opening up a letter or a simple form in Word format. But if you want to claim that it's faultless for all documents, I have many thousands of pages in Word
I make close to 40 dollars an hour. If I spend 10 hours learning OpenOffice, any savings are washed out. Will it take me 10 hours to leran? No... but what if I have to spend 15 minutes working around a difference? How about 2 minutes fixing some document that didn't translate well? Add em all up, and the savings is gone. Now perform these calculations, but use Doctor salaries. Use attorney salaries. Or executive assistant salaries. Do the math. The cost of software is really insignificant in comparison to people-time.
Most slashdotters advocating open source on the desktop think they are battling a monopoly or vendor lock-in. From a business's perspective, the best software is ALWAYS the software you know, the software with which you are most productive.
My simple reading skills saw "It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station, he said." and assumed that mean Linux rather than Staw Office. But the detailed issues involved are not totally clear from the various media coverage.
As for the cost, the Register's coverage said, "Stirling also wanted to avoid splashing out £100,000 on a third party application to meet the deadline for compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, and instead chose to overhaul the entire IT system. He adds that he is still making a saving overall, by making the switch."
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.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about. If you think cops are just moronic, club-wielding brutes that walk a beat, you're dead wrong. They do a lot of office work, and a significant portion of the police force exist entirely within an office.
And maybe you've never worked in a real office at all. While I don't find a lot of the fancy-shmancy features of modern WPs necessary, people do use them.
I like bread.
Well, I'm your typical slashdotter, about 30 and a professional programmer. I just say that to say this: I've never read, heard, or seen a concept that couldn't be expressed in simple text typed into notepad. Furthermore, I'm pretty certain the vast majority of things I've read (think advertising) could benefit from some less "features."
I really don't understand why a police officer -- or anyone else for that matter -- would require more than the grandparent poster suggests. Rather than just making assertions ("You're arrogant and you have zero clue") why not educate us. Why do they need more? What, specifically, would they need? What idea is there that cannot be expressed in text?
How does a blind person see a font?
I never understood why they can't just save things as RTFs more often. Is it because that would require the use of a complicated *gasp* pull-down menu? If they're so worried about compatibility, why not just use RTFs for things that don't use images? And I'm just assuming the police don't use wordart as frequently as my 6th grade class did. And why is there such a bias against the TXT format? If all you're concerned about is the information in the document and pictures aren't necessary, why does it have to look pretty?
Esoteric reference.
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.
You've spent how long exactly sitting in a UK police station watching policemen use computers? Your experience does not coincide with mine.
Stan Liebowitz (a professor of economics at the University of Texas) makes a fairly convincing case that Word and Excel succeeded because they were better than the competing products. Both were market leaders on Mac before PC, so those who think Microsoft cheated have to come up with an explanation of how it did so on Mac.
I'm a scientist, so I can assure you I deal with equations, figures, pictures, etc. all the time. The newest version of OO - 1.9 - deals with equations from MS Equation and images too. Not sure what you're using for your drawings. I'd recommend common image formats and the conversion will be fine - if you use less supported proprietary standards and expect them to work outside Word, well, that's not very realistic when the plugin was probably made for Word and Word alone.
The layout looked fine too for me. I agree that, with the myriad of vendor plugins that exist for Word, that guaranteeing interoperability won't get you far. But as a user you can make sure your documents open fine in either by avoiding more rare plugin formats.
Speaking as someone who did some consulting about 4 years ago on technical architecture to a police department, I can see how this would happen.
... police officers are "kinda flakey" when it comes to things like copyright. ie. they don't earn shedloads and they like to pirate software they can use at home. MS products are cool and sexy in this department because they are expensive retail.
You see (how can I put this delicately?)
Also, as someone else pointed out, they are completely beholden to their PC support people - who are frequently MS drones.
I well remember having the drones in to back up the MS salespeople and insist, nay insist, that MS products could completely replace a huge IBM mainframe application (and associated database) that has evolved over the last 30 years (and has 30 years of data in it).
"Migration? We can rewrite that in Access in 10 seconds flat. Scale? Just scale out. Integrate? Nah, just partition the data for common queries"
They had absolutely no clue, but they (the MS weenies) had the ear of the senior officers because they were the "go-to-guys" when the chief superintendents laptop broke.
It was very difficult to get past this, and we basically had to persuade the PC guys that "yes, you'll still have jobs; no, we like you really; no, we're not pulling out PC's"
Gee - I thought I was wrong and I wasn't ;-)
Grandparent says $108 per user per year. We're paying about a third of that but have almost 70x the user base.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
This isn't really any big surprise. Microsoft Office became the defacto standard a long time ago, so not using Office automatically puts you out of step with the majority of businesses. Even if StarOffice and OpenOffice had 100% compatibility, they would still not be Microsoft Office. Whether by ethical means or not, Microsoft won the market, so until such time as PCs are no longer in use or we no longer need tools like Microsoft Office, competitors don't stand a chance no matter how good they are. Indeed, Windows itself is not the secret of Microsoft's power, that would be Office.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
"Open Office is good for techs but not for normal people"
The 400+ grade school students who attend the school at which I work would disagree with you.
Until very recently they were all using the MS Office suite. We wholesale converted them to OpenOffice and none of them skipped a beat.
To them software is software, and OpenOffice was just as good as MS Office for their needs.
I've tried it and hate it. It's why I use macs: linux office apps suck. My office mate is a dieshard roll-your-own linux user and has been using star office as long as it has been around. He still truggles with it's byzantine menus. My other office mate is also a pure linux user and he gave up on it. He only uses TeX. He found remebering laTex is actually a lot easier and more consistent and powerful than remembering the star-office menu confusion.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
When you try to do something even mildly advanced in OOo (like using Avery Labels in Landscape instead of Portrait mode) or even something as simple as printing a #10 envelope, OOo often falls down, badly.
When these issues are brought up to the developers (via their bug reporting system), the report is either ignored outright (in the case of the envelope printing) or the report is dismissed as a "feature enhancement" request and not a bug.
Come on people, you can't ask people to submit bug reports only to ignore or dismiss those reports.
I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that this agency indeed had submitted bug reports and were summarily ignored and/or dismissed. Hint time folks: this tends to piss people off, especially decision makers!
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
I love it! We actually have a vi flamewar going in a Microsoft v. Open discussion!
Now I wish I used emacs so I could turn this into a emacs v. vi flamewar!
Seriously, I use and love vi. I wouldn't use it to sell newbies on *nix, Linux, or Free Software as an alternative to Windows.
vi is a great editor once you climb its serious learning curve. Oddities like the ed mode versus the visual mode actually turn out to be strengths, but let's face it, they are oddities created from mashing a cursor-addressible editor onto a TTY style line editor. vi is a Frankenstein's monster of an editor. And like that creature it is powerful and dangerous.
I always edit with vi (well, vim these days), but I'd start a newbie out with pico or kate or some such thing.
Very frustrating for me as a UNIX admin, and user. ALL, and let me put that in bold, ALL recruiters and HR people will only handle .doc resumes. Not a single recruiter or HR person I have ever dealt with (in 10 years) would accept a PDF, ASCII, or other formatted document. I find that fucking retarded, but it's something that we have to deal with if we want to eat.
.doc attachment of the job description. That pisses me off too.
Don't believe me? I have documented my job search. The best is when they send a blank email with a
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I make web applications for a living, and to duplicate what these guys can do with Word is far from trivial. Why? Because using a tool like Word gets them functionality for free that is a lot of work to code.
Well, you must not be very good at it then. I make web applications for a living too, and I could do this stuff in my sleep.
rich text - a word processor has a ton of features for rich text, including bold, italics, and lists like this one
This is not an advertising piece, it's a technical form. There is no need for any of this crap. Police documents and reports should not be formatted willy-nilly, they should be standardized and easily machine readable. Giving these capacities to police departments is simply a bad idea.
images - a picture's worth a thousand words
Are you seriously trying to tell me that you can't put images into a web application?
change history - knowing who did what is hugely helpful, and a lot of work to code
If you're using forms and a database, this is beyond trivial. I throw it into every web app I build because it takes so little effort that it's worth it just in case.
document transfer - if somebody needs to share a document, give control to somebody else, save a copy for reference, or just show it to somebody, that's easy with a document: you can email it, put it on a floppy, CD, or USB key, or put in on a network drive
Yes, you're right. The internet really isn't a very good infrastructure for document transfer. I can't believe you actually put this on your little list.
printing - any word processor gives you great control over printed output; web sites need to render everything to PDFs for that and making a web interface for controlling all that would be a bitch
Or, of course, you could use a combination of a modern browser, X(HT)ML, XSL and CSS. The 90's are over, get with the times.
widely understood - people learn how to use Word in high school now, not for whatever custom interface you build in a browser
I know, it's very challenging to use an application that is custom tailored to your problem domain, especially when you use it on a daily basis to earn your living. And we all know that only PHDs get training in using browsers and web forms.
richer UI - web apps are making some progress, but GUI apps can still have a much better user experience
If you were talking about a fat client application, you might have a point. But you're defending Word. It might be a rich UI if you're a copy editor for a magazine, but if you're a cop knocking off some reports, it's a barebones UI where you need to do all the labourous formatting yourself and full of extraneous crap that is irrelevant to what you're using it for.
And as I pointed out in another post, modifying the web app requires a real programmer, whereas any secretary can futz with forms in MS Word or change the mail merge.
Well, if you're the sort of hack whose work I'm always fixing, that's true. If, on the other hand, you've actually put in an administrative interface and used suitable abstractions, they should be able to update the thing in every fashion they are likely to need with hand-holding included.
I love web apps, but using your psychic powers to say that people you've never seen doing work you don't know about can get along fine with a trivial web app is just asinine.
My father is currently a police officer, and I'm a professional internet application developer. I didn't need to use my psychic powers for this one. Besides, using them tires me out, so I try to save them for extracting useful information from upper-management types, as that is where they are most needed.
Thank you for your little arguments. They were mildly entertaining. Do you have any more?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth