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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.
Now before we all agree that they suck and start the conspiracy of how much MS paid them to switch back... Perhaps they have some valid points here. What can the Linux movement do to curb the switchbacks, and address some of these concerns?
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing
Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare.
"'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'"
Perhaps someone should send them this: Open Office Roadmap
I don't think it could be any more clear or easier to find....
Get a web developer
Expensive upgrades shoved down your throat by forced upgrades due to designed incompatibilities with previous versions? Why can't newer versions of office access all the older versions?
"In addition, you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future."
Why do I think the exact opposite? I have more faith in ODF being supported by multiple apps, say, twenty years from now.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
But OpenOffice has a long, long way to go. The fit and finish, polish and performance of Microsoft Office to this point, is unparalleled. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but I'm not a Microsoft hater either. I'm just a realist.
When OpenOffice can step up its interface, design, compatibility, and market share, then we might have something to talk about. But as we sit right now, Microsoft Office is the only game in town that does what it does.
It only helps Microsoft to build products on top of Office, like Sharepoint, Project, etc... because they leverage an already existing knowledge of the UI and functionality. Office 2007 is a drastic departure from prior versions, but as I have been using it since the RTM date, it's been rock solid and I'm exceptionally pleased at how much more intelligent it has gotten, in particular with Excel and figuring out what I want to do, or in Word with how I'm formatting a document.
I still am hoping for a kickass version of OpenOffice though, just so that Microsoft doesn't rest on its laurels. Office 2007 indicates that they did anything but, and the polish of that product is something that I'm very surprised by, especially by Microsoft. Kudos to them for this round.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Why? Because someone couldn't make open source work for them? I think they provided a fair assessment of some of the major obstacles to open source. The school district I work for is clamoring for a switch to MSO from Star Office 8. Why? Because we can't find people to train employees in SO8, which means our training funds from the state are wasted and because we are completely unsupported.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
...doesn't mean it's cheaper. I am kind of a open-source fanboy myself, but when it came time to either buy Photoshop or spend valuable hours learning to use Gimp, I also opted for the cash-heavy/time-light option.
My employer pays something like $40/hr (I think..I'm salary). So if I spent even 10 hours getting as good with Gimp as I already am with Photoshop, then the closed-source product is cheaper. But I do use all open source at home when time is less important than money.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Well, duh?
I like Openoffice, and I appreciate everything they're doing.
On the other hand, if I could buy MS Office for Linux, I would. It really is just better.
For all that OO tries, it just isn't as compatible with MS Office formats as it needs to be for me to use it. I always have formatting errors with word documents, sometimes I have entire excel spreadsheets that are useless, and I just can't have that.
I have MS office on my powerbook, and I use that for the documents that OO can't handle. I produce the vast majority of documents on there too. If I had Office on Linux, I would use it instead, but I don't.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Yea, those word processors and spreadsheet programs need a good roadmap. Think of how much they have changed since Office 97.
That it's office productivity software. You can generate your own road map.
*Version +1. Just like the current version, but with slightly more features and shiny icons!
*As above.
What are they worried about? That the OpenOffice roadmap might include:
*Given up on office suite. This version is a badger tracking application. Enjoy!
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Some valid points:
Doug Wilson is the Chief Information Officer, The New Zealand Automobile Association Incorporated
Since then he has been the CEO of a PC company (Gateway) and APL+, a software development company that was a Provenco subsidiary. He has also had senior roles at Microsoft and EDS.
Doug is currently the CIO of the NZ Automobile Association, a new role that was created last year.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Why? Because someone couldn't make open source work for them?
No, because TFA specifically said that MS "conceded" to letting their users run office at home.
I'm not saying the points for switching back to MSO aren't potentially valid but this story reminds me of a lot of recent trends. Companies/governments only have to mention the word "Linux" or "Open Source" around MS these days and suddenly they are falling over backward to give a better deal, concede on a license issue and in general make people feel like their getting a better deal then the rest of the world. It's a great new procurement strategy:
1. "Evaluate" open source for next upgrade cycle
2. Negotiate with MS for lower license fees
3. Cite training/hidden costs as reason for giving up on Open Source
Again, not saying that some reasons for sticking with MS aren't valid but some of this is just plain gaming the system.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Seems likely, seeing as this CIO used to work for Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/nz/presscentre/articles/2 004/feb_04_wilson.mspx
Excel, Access, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Publisher are all just word processors? What about all the back-end collaboration tools?
If you think MSO and OO.o are "just word processors", just stick with Wordpad. It came with Windows.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Also seems to be the very same guy who won a laptop from the website publishing this story only last year. http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/E2D91FD29 42D4382CC25724400106374
You can look into previous roadmaps, and measure how much they have come through in the past.
You can do the same with open source, and free software projects.
OO didn't have any issues coming through with planned features in the past.
I don't think MS had any issues with roadmaps, my Longhorn Tablet PC works great with WinFS right now.
After actually reading the article, the reasons they switched to MS Office are:
*They weren't sure if it was cheaper or not, so they bought MS Office (again), which guarantees that OOo was cheaper.
*MS told them some stories about future plans that MS may or may not do with MS Office, and OOo didn't.
*Someone wanted to use Word and Sharepoint as a CMS for their website.
*They didn't actually switch 100% to OOo, so there were occasional internal compatibility issues between OOo users and MS Office users. It would also seem that some employees were sending ODF docs to the outside world, and people didn't know what they were.
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.
I've heard a lot of reasons to use MS Office instead of OOo, but this looks to be a pretty sorry collection of excuses. So far, the only two that come up in my line of work are lack of training, and poor VBA support. There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
"it's just a word processor"
So, in other words, you've never worked inside a modern corporate office.
Users use of the suite of applications that come in Microsoft Office to do complex things, from presentations, to databases, to collaboration, to complex spreadsheets, etc etc. There's a *lot* of functionality present in OO or MS Office and it's not all trivial to use.
When I bought my last car they dealer conceded to selling it for a price lower than what was shown on the sticker.
How is MS offering a discount/incentive/license concession any different? Some MS sales rep had a potential sale of 500 seats, and had to sweeten the deal to get a sale. Purchasing people are always pushing for a better deal, and threatening to take their business elsewhere if they don't get it.
...just stick with Wordpad. It came with Windows.He could... if WordPad, err, wasn't so incompatible with reading default MS Office - generated .doc files...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Open office training videos.
Now, I just got that from a Google search, so I'm not sure about the quality of the videos, but it should be enough to get most "typical" users over the superficial differences between Microsoft Office and Open Office.
I hate Microsoft. I hate them with a passion. I don't own a single Windows machine.
But OpenOffice.org is an absolute piece of shit compared to Microsoft Office.
Mind you, I use OO.o over Office-- because I'd feel filthy using Office. But I fucking hate the thing. It's bloated, poorly designed, and butt-ugly. Compatibility issues aside-- since I know quite well that reverse-engineering Microsoft's convoluted file formats is far from simple or easy-- OO.o is a crappy program, not the be-all, end-all of word processing that it's marketed as. As quirky as MS Office is, OO.o crosses the line from 'quirky' into 'crappy'.
Frankly, what do I think is the best office suite? Office 97 or 2000. Everything after that just went downhill.
But I digress.
Most of the time, when I have to edit a letter, or a resume, or something else vaguely simple, I just whip open TextEdit. OpenOffice is a bloated sack of crap, MS Office makes me feel like I need to take a bath, and the rest of the contenders for 'best office suite' crown are nonstarters.
When the only serious choices for office suite are 'bloated piece of crap' and 'creepy Microsoft Borgware', it's only due to my distaste for the latter that I use the former. And I avoid even that whenever possible.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
It's easy to bang together a quick PowerPoint presentation if you want to put some slides up for a presentation you are doing to your class. It's easy to bang together a presentation if all of the data that you need is stored in a single location, or in a single spreadsheet. On the other hand if you need to draw together data from multiple business units spread across the globe that are stored on servers spread across the globe, you might want some collaboration tools. You might want something like SharePortal and Office 2007. Your board of directors might expect to see things like trend data, and market capitalization, and ROI, and all sorts of other information that people often store in Excel, or Access or SQL, or Oracle, or whatever. You might a tool like Excel that can pull data from multiple data sources and correlate it before you dump it into something like PowerPoint to display it.
You are right when you think that the individual, specific tasks in and of themselves may not be all that complex. However tying all of those tasks together in an enterprise environment is a completely different story.
I also have some experience with switching users over to OOo from Microsoft Office. Here are some pointers:
* Nearly all female users will refuse to switch and complain at every little difference. At a school, we decided that the school would provide OpenOffice.org on all teacher computers, if the teacher wanted to use MS Office they would have to come up with the funds somewhere else beside the Technology related budgets. All of the Male teachers (except 1) happily switched to OOo. All of the Female teachers (except the handful that had no experience with MS Office) chose to purchase MS Office on their own.
* Most people use a word processor by typing something in, highlighting text and changing fonts, spacing, etc. A well instructed lesson in Styles will lessen the impact people have when switching to OOo. It will probably increase productivity once they learn to use styles instead of micro-managing their documents.
* If you are seriously planning a deployment, test out users on a Linux Distribution. In my experience OOo works much better (and much faster) within Linux than it does in Windows. Also, I have (surprisingly) found that many people find Linux easier to use than Windows (using Novell's SLED 10).
* Show your users how to use the Help Documentation. It actually works with OOo.
If you are considering a switch, do not be too high strung. People will complain, but that is human nature. Also be sure to keep at least a few workstations that run MS Office, not for compatibility issues, but to have the user's show you how they do something within MS Office that they cannot figure out in OpenOffice.org (Most people think they are experts in Word, but usually aren't and this will weed out the idiotic problems).
> If you or anyone else can't figure out how to use Open Office without "training" they've got to be dumb
> as rocks. And I'm not writing flame-bait here. I dead serious about that.
By writing that you make it clear that you have never had to deal with 'normals'. Wish I worked where you work, but I don't live on a planet where everyone is computer literate[1], capable of independent learning and posseses above average intelligence and reasoning abilities. Thankfully we never allowed Microsoft in the front door though so we manage to get along with OO.o/FF/etc running on networked Linux workstations. We didn't have to deal with the whinging due an inability to deal with change but do training? What fantasy world are you living in. It can take sometimes take a week to get a new hire to learn that logging in with CAPS LOCK on won't work.
[1] I define 'computer literate' much the same way as I define 'literacy'. Literacy in the sense of the English Language means one able to read the language, speak it, reason in it and express thoughts in writing using it. Computer literacy means the ability to read and write PROGRAMS, even simple ones, understand the ideas underlying common applications i.e. understand what cut/paste DOES, not memorizing the keystroke. Know the IDEA behind a spreadsheet. Knowing every function isn't required, knowing enough to figure out the help system IS.
Democrat delenda est
Apache + Postfix + Mailman + Subversion + Request-Tracker + [insertfavoritewikihere] = voila....
Customizable, expandable, and portable. It can even easily be made rather secure. I've installed this combo many times and not a single dissatisfied customer.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
It's a work flow / collaboration tool. Think of it as a Wiki on steroids that is fully integrated with Office. It can act as a document repository. It can drive a workflow. The product is new and it is a PITA to get setup and running (which is pretty much the case with any new MS product). I've personally seen it implimented at an architectural firm. They have a lot of requirements when it comes to submitting bids. They need a lot of documentation to go with the bid. Sharepoint provides a convenient place for them to organize all of the information in one place. It sends out notifications to team members as the project progresses. Everyone who needs to be aware of their responsibilities is aware of them. Nobody can say, "I didn't know that I need to do ...." because it's all right there in SharePoint.
There is nothing new in this.
Employees can get a licensed copy of Microsoft Office desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office Professional, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Visio Professional, to install and use on a home computer. The only cost to employees for the Home Use Program benefit is the cost of media (CDs), shipping, and handling. Volume Licensing: Home Use Program
Employees are encouraged to discontinue use of the software on termination of their employment, but there has never been a mechanism in place to enforce the rules.
If you work for the NHS you can order Office 2007 on-line for a S&H cost of eighteen pounds, Microsoft Home User Programme
"...but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing..."
They kept getting a div by $0 error.