Munich Delays Linux Conversion

It doesn't come easy writes "A short blurb over at The Register reports that Munich has decided to extend the pilot phase of their Linux migration project. One smart move mentioned: Many of their office workers will switch to OpenOffice on Windows first where it is comfortable, easing the transition."

Comments

Open Office is Open Office... Or is it?

[Nerd Systems]

I am a little confused here... why the switch to OpenOffice on Windows first, then to Linux second? Is that not an extra step, that could be totally done away with?

Isn't OpenOffice on Windows the same as OpenOffice on Linux? I see in the story at The Register that they have various office templates and scripts that they want to port to OpenOffice, yet why waste time removing Office from each machine, then installing OpenOffice, then getting all the scripts and templates to work, then having to recreate things when done again in the Linux environment? Why not just cut out the middle steps and go directly from Office on Windows, to OpenOffice on Linux?

People, am I missing something here, or would it not just be best to just go to Linux with openOffice functionality directly, and not even bother with this middle step? If you ask me, it sounds like something else here is amiss, as their reasoning seems flawed to me...

I can understand people being concerned about switching from a Microsoft Windows environment, using Office for their word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation tasks... yet as far as things go, Linux can do the same things with OpenOffice just as easily...

Also, Linux has a web browser, music player, everything that a company could need to do business with, and these days, with the majority of applications that companies needing built on web-based infrastructures, there really is very little reason to run Windows these days. Of course some companies still have applications that are Windows-only, but with time I can see more applications being able to function on Linux...

Another bonus of running Linux is the amount of spyware that will be cut down drastically, as windows is well known for how easy spyware can infect it and totally ruin a system image. If they would just hurry up and switch to Linux, so many problems would be solved...

Oh well, at least they can build cars right over in Germany...

Office compatibility

[Bob54321]

Although the compatability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice has definitely improved, it would be interesting to know how much trouble is had in this region. The switch to OpenOffice because it is free arguement does not take into account the amount of time spent trying to make old documents work. If it could be shown by a large organization that all is good many more may make the switch

Some questions

[Mostly a lurker]

I have a strong feeling that the City of Munich is typical of large, long standing MS Windows/MS Office organizations. It would be really interesting to know what the most challenging issues involved in the switch are and whether any look set to prove intractable. Some likely suspects I can see are

• User resistance: people like to stay with what they know rather than being pushed to use something unfamiliar.
• Extensive use of MS Office only features such as VBA or features that work differently in Open Office.
• Applications using Active-X or other COM controls that are not easily converted to WINE or similar.
• Third party software products that are only supported under Windows.
• What else?

There is probably a /.er somewhere who, at least anonymously, could tell us.

Re:Open Office is Open Office... Or is it?

[einhverfr]

So basically, despite trying to sound like you know what you're talking about, you don't know enough about large scale human-office-computer dynamics to closely estimate the completion time.

I came up with that estimate based on my experience working at major corporations and seeing how they made migrations. An OS migration on the desktop has to be one of the most painful migrations you can put an organization through.

I would also point out that so far the large migrations in progress are either being scaled back or are moving towards the 4-year timeline (+/- a year).

There are also some other good reasons for this estimate. Often this is the OS upgrade lifecycle (and sometimes even line of business tools lifecycle) in many organizations, so it makes sense that you can phase out other line of business apps in favor of those that are cross-platform in this length of time. In essence, I figure one can probably go with a 4-year migration plan without spending a huge sum more on the migration.