Slashdot Mirror
NZ Outfit Dumps Open Office For MS Office
(Score.5, Interestin writes "The NZ Automobile Association has just announced that it is dropping Open Office and switching back to MS Office. According to their CIO, 'Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.' In addition, 'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'" About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
not only is this article plain and simply fud (you could argue *any* piece of software requires training-- and honestly, if you are so *stupid* you can't figure out a word processor, maybe you aren't qualified for the job) it also shouldn't be news every time some company switches to or from MS Office.
"So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of some formatting issues with MS' undocumented file formats, some features that aren't actually available yet in MS Office looked interesting, and improper use of OOo by employees."
So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of OOo's inability to handle business-standard formats*, new features in development that they wish to use in the future, and a lack of qualified training for their employees.
(* Waah! Microsoft is mean! They won't freely** hand over their work, like we will! And we can't come up with better file formats that MS would have to support!)
(** Free as in some restrictions may apply, not as in beer.)
Wow. I've never known there were so many parrots on Slashdot. You may say what you please about Windows - the operating system blows, without question. I can't believe people are stupid enough to think OOo is somehow 'better' than MSO because it's open source or whatever. There's a reason MSO dominates the office suite industry, and it ain't because of monopoly, or proprietary file formats, or whatever excuse Slashdotters are giving at the moment. At the end of the day, OOo is a toy compared to MSO.
This only in Vista's version of Wordpad. They probably dropped "Notepad" and downscaled "Wordpad" to accomodate. No big deal.
You know of a developer that is going to alter Open Office significantly for only $50K? You got a name/number?
I don't respond to AC's.
We tried switching of Open Office in our company and we've had an endless stream of problems. Don't get me wrong - OpenOffice on its own is good enough and in some things better than MS Office. However before it is 100% compatible with MSOffice, it cannot be used as a replacement. And when I say 100%, I mean it.
Some of our problems included:
- Inability to edit files created with MSOffice. The formatting would be lost, or some parts (e.g. pictures) were not editable at all.
- Exporting files was similarly problematic (alas, 100% of our partners and customers require to receive MS Office documents). Sometimes files would look different in MSOffice.
- MSOffice has better help system
- Everybody already is familiar with MSOffice.
It turned out that everybody needed to have a copy of MSOffice anyway, to check if the files converted cleanly, etc. It was all pointless.