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.)

Comments

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[ozphx]

Also you want to be very careful if you are providing Word documents to clients. If an OO document is exported to Word format and looks like ass then regardless of where the fault is, it looks like your fault.

This especially goes for submitting documents for tenders. You don't want to be rejected for a million bucks of work because you were too tight to pay the couple of hundred bucks in MS tax ;)