Slashdot Mirror
Can a Small Business Migrate Smoothly To OpenOffice.org v3?
Pay The Piper writes "As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious 'free vs. expensive' argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?" (Given that company-wide rollouts take some time to implement, this early look at the features of OO.o 3.1 may have some relevance, too.)
Pick a sample of users - some tech-savvy, some not - who interoperate with others still using microsoftware. A pilot should bring out the most pressing points of contact and show whether or not the compatibility level is adequate.
This is a good analysis. Don't listen to the guys below who are just saying YES RAH RAH OPEN SOURCE and who have never worked in IT or had to deal with managers howling at them when a 10 year old document won't open correctly in a new software package.
I love open source too, but let's be realistic here.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
For example do you have Word setup to access a database or something ridiculous like that?
Mail merge is not usually an odd-ball feature for anyone who has more than a handful of friends or clients. As an aside and from experience, attempting to mail merge anything with over 3,000 rows in OOo generally results in pain.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Your biggest griper will be a finance guy (like me). For him, just buy excel. Forcing him to use something other than excel is cruel and unusual punishment.
Your response to this disqualifies you as any kind of authority on this type of question. You are combative, hard headed and have absolutely no empathy for the folks you are supposed to be serving. As a manager, I would NEVER have this type of attitude towards people or allow that type of attitude to germinate in my department. You think your point of view is the only valid ones and anyone who disagrees is an idiot. frankly, you are the type of person that gives IT workers a bad name.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Nothing handles MSOffice files well, not even other Microsoft applications. Their format is a mystery wrapped in an enigma enveloped by a binary blob.
The same whiners that will complain about OO will also complain about MS Office 2007... the GUI change is so drastic. OO's GUI is closer to Office 2000 than Office 2007 is.
We tried migrating a company with 40 users maybe three years ago, to Sun's boxed version. It was a complete and utter failure. Maybe it's gotten better now, but I'd be pretty weary. There were a thousand and one little incompatibilities. Plus some of our people use Excel for things god never intended it to do.
One thing is we deal with the government a lot, which always has the latest version of Office. Keeping up with that using non-MS software is pretty hard.
I think if your office only does very general word processing and spreadsheet use, it might work. But a lot of people have noted the powerpoint issues.
Basically, if it doesn't just work perfectly, it's a support nightmare. When we tried the experiment, I remember we'd author something, send it off, it'd come back with revisions from a customer with real MS office, we'd open it and it'd be all messed up, and that would happen going the other direction as well.
I don't think I'm ready to try that experiment any time soon. It's not worth the money saved, yet.
MS Office doesn't even handle MS Office files. I've had Excel corrupt many spreadsheets itself, things I saved by Excel that the same app couldn't open again on the same computer.
.doc with Word that I created in OO.o.
That said, OO.o is quite compatible with MSOffice if you don't get too insane with the formatting and such. I have yet to have someone have a problem opening a
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
If you're doing IT for people who's job descriptions require basic computer skills, it's perfectly okay to tell them to suck it up when they have to transition away from software that is one week shy of a decade old, particularly if you offer some training classes.
Besides, when has it ever made sense to pamper employees who's skills are ten years out of date?
One thing I learned as a software developer, is you can create an application that conforms to specifications but is hated by the end users, even those who designed the spec. What I learned is that you need to take a lot of time up front, and talk with all of the users and other stakeholders. You need to listen to what they say and don't say and then you need to figure out what they really want. It is usually different than what they are expressly asking for. Part of that is respecting everyone in the process, regardless of their attitude. If you can demonstrate that you really want to give them what they need and will help them with that process, you will get very little of the backbiting that original poster expressed.
Where does this begin? Nothing technical. Nothing taught in school. You have to sincerely respect people from all areas, not just the IT minded. Not just the higher ups. Everyone. Once you start with that frame of mind, doors open. Granted, sometimes it takes a conscious effort to get to that frame of mind. Sometimes, people rub you the wrong way.... they have agendas, and you have to take a deep breath and step back. But calling your users Luddites and worse sure ain't the way to go. Frankly, the attitude disgusts me.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You're absolutely wrong. This isn't "just a little bit of re-training". This is a big deal. The thing is, everyone uses MS Office. If someone can't do some little task, chances are they can ask one of their co-workers. You can't ever really under-estimate this kind of knowledge, and what it's worth. The cost of an entire corporation which is switching over all at once to a new piece of productivity software is quite high, in terms of productivity.
I say this as a low-level project manager who successfully convinced my company to move to OpenOffice 3. We're doing phased deployments, one team at a time, over the course of the next year, that way the whole thing doesn't grind us to a halt. We're sticking with Outlook, at least for now, but the rest of MS Office is going away, starting with Word. Why are we doing this?
1) cost
2) extensibility (plugin development)
3) stability of the ODF format
We've built some automation tools that leverage ODF to save us hundreds of man-hours per year. ODF is more elegant and stable than any of Microsoft's solutions, and so we built a whole stack of XSLT's and tools around it. We support MS Word formats, but only by running them through OO.o's conversion filters to ODF first.
If we didn't build this, the cost of switching to OO.o would far outweigh the licensing costs.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
which is why it is such a popular malware container. :)
The problem is that in the eyes of your users, if MS Office corrupts or cannot read a file, it is the file's fault, but if OpenOffice cannot read a file, it is OpenOffice's fault.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Nothing handles MSOffice files well, not even other Microsoft applications. Their format is a mystery wrapped in an enigma enveloped by a binary blob.
This notwithstanding, if Office 2007 fails to open an old document it will probably be considered "one of those things, document must be corrupted, never mind, these things happen". This may not be the reaction if something similar happens with OO.o
By *buying* something to fix something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place. Awesome.