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.
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.