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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.)
Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0
I will say that although I have not had the joy of opening Office 2000 files with OO.o 3.0, I do recall there being some serious issues between powerpoint slides. Some weird rendering going on in OO.o for what reason I do not know. In my line of work, powerpoint is perversely pervasive--to the point of alarm for me. If this is true for you, do some testing before taking the plunge!
Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office ...
I regrettably give you the option of getting Novell's OO.o distribution (here) in which you can install an extension for OpenXML.
The best recommendation I can give you is to do this change only if you can assure that it will not hinder your ability to serve your customer or detract largely from productivity.
My work here is dung.
Short : YES.
Long : Yes, but you will have to tell the office whiners to STFU.
Honestly it's not that hard, it requires some retraining of habits. and requires users to not be raging Luddites.
If you get management buy in for it, the transition will take weeks before all the whining dies down. the only problem is when you get users that are not smart enough to understand what they were instructed to do because they did it the other way for the past 5 years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I am inclined to say "No", but a better answer is "probably not". We all know those little offices, work processes stitched together by a global excel spreadsheet with countless obscure VB Macros... touch one little thing and everything grinds to a halt. Hell, this happens when just upgrading to a new version of Microsoft Office. Imagine the pain of trying to get these things to work with OpenOffice's shoddy VBA support.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
That entirely depends on how heavily you rely on odd-ball features in office.
For example do you have Word setup to access a database or something ridiculous like that?
If you are just doing basic word processing it is unlikely that you will run into any problems beyond the (marginally) different UI.
Do your documents utilize VB macros? If so, you may want to look at Novell's fork of OOo at go-oo.org which improve macro support. Otherwise mainline OOo should open all your MS Office 2000 documents with ease.
The interface of OOo is closer to MS Office 2000, than MS Office 2007's interface is. Training users should actually be easier than training users on MS Office 2007.
When I converted my mother to Linux I told her she'd have to give up MS Office. When I installed openSUSE 11 and OOo 3, she thanked me for giving her MS Office. It looked so similar, she couldn't tell the difference.
The only little bit of advice I'd give you, is to go into the program options and set the default file formats. While I praise ODF, and want the world to adopt it, if you're going to send documents out to the rest of the world, you'll have to save them either in PDF format (which OOo does natively) or save them in MS formats for everyone else.
When you're done, tell your boss how you just saved the company $400 a pop times 50 people, and ask for a raise.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Our office of 50+ transitioned back in the early 2.0 days with nary a hitch. A couple of people still have MS Office for specific compatibility reasons (certain spreadsheet macros, that sort of thing) but everyone else from IT to the receptionist has OOo. We spent approximately $0.00 on training, instead going with "here's your new word processor". People who need office suites picked up on it quickly and people who primarily do other things didn't really care.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
short answer: yes.
long answer: yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees (sorry Yahtzee!).
a friend of mine migrated to OOo a year ago and most of his employees didn't even noticed. he owns a small architecture office.
only the oddball document that doesn't open right in OOo, he opens and converts on his own notebook, the only one in the company that have MS stuff.
What ? Me, worry ?
Yes, for most things.
No for powerpoint. From what I've used, OO.org's Impress is simply not as good, has rendering issues, flickers, is a resource hog, is not smooth, etc. Powerpoint is way better.
Can you do office docs and spreadsheets? Yeah. If not using the aforementioned VB macros and whatnot, it's easy to use openoffice.org for stuff like "word" documents and spreadsheets.
But presentations ... blech.
As far as migration, in many ways OO.org does a better job with file formats than MS Office. In particular, I recently had to open a MS Office 2007 document(docx), and rather than getting the filter into MS Word, I just loaded in into OO.org. To put it plainly, I have no problem opening any files in OO.org.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The fact is not EVERYONE needs Office, but some people do. Which baffles me why a corporation wouldn't consider deploying OOo to everyone, and give MS Office to the people who depend on weird MS Office features. This way you save the most money while not slowing your business process!
If you are going from Office 2000 to OpenOffice.Org you will go almost effortlessly.
There may be a few small things here and there that users may gripe about, like obscure formatting issues, but nothing earth shattering.
If, as you say, you are going from MSO-2000 to OO.o3.x, then Microsoft Office XML should not be an issue as 2000 can't open that anyway.
Tell everyone to check their spreadsheets for numeric accuracy and functionality as some funtions and macros work differently.
After that, you have to sell it!! Tell them how wonderful it is. Talk about PDF export. Tell them they can have a copy for home!! Tell them they don't have to enter an endless stream of letters and numbers just to install it.
I renamed the "OO.org Document" icon to "word". Set the defaults to save as ms .doc files. Works great.
THL phish sticks
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.
Instead of asking Slashdot, although I'm happy you did as OpenOffice always generates a good flameware, you should be asking your users.
In particular you should gather the people who're likely to have the biggest problems with migrating: accountants for example, often have massive and complex spreadsheets, not to mention VB macros. Create a focus group, or go around each of these people to see how they're using the software, then create a requirements document and test OpenOffice against it.
The advantage of a requirements document is that if OpenOffice doesn't 'fit the bill' at the moment, you'll be able to check newer versions (and even different office suites, such as KOffice) against it in future.
If OpenOffice meets the requirements of your users in theory, test them in practice. Gather anyone who's adventurous enough to try out OpenOffice alongside Microsoft Office and get them to give you feedback. Even if OpenOffice doesn't meet requirements now, check back in a year. Also, check on how other office suites, such as KOffice, are coming along. You may not be able to replace Office immediately, but that doesn't mean you should give up on trying!
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Your biggest hurdle is training. Getting people to learn the new software.
If your office trades documentation that has specific formatting that will be another problem unless you convert it to a standard like PDF. Then you run into the problem of people who need to edit those documents who are not using your software.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I suggest that you also install Gnumeric, since it works a lot better with Excel spread-sheets than OOo Calc does.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It depends on what you're doing with email and calendar. MS Office includes Outlook, after all, and if your office is using Outlook/Exchange as its email solution then you could hit a big problem in the transition.
OOo is a good replacement for the document preparation parts of Office, with a much less irritating UI than Office 2007, but email is a problem.
Dunx
Converting caffeine into code since 1982
Funny. SLES ships with a Go-OO build. Many distros use the Go-OO branch in their stable releases that they advertise for production use.
There is an unstable branch of Go-OO, and there are stable releases of Go-OO. Obviously, I'd suggest you use the stable branch in a production environment.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Being as you are moving from a version of Microsoft Office that is coming on 9 years old, you should be using mostly files whose formats are (mostly) well understood. Taking documents, macros, and the like from that old version should be fairly straightforward. If you were instead looking to move from a brand new version of MS Office to the latest Open Office your chances would likely be much slimmer.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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.
There will be two key things that determine how much work the transition will be, (in my experience).
1. How much VB is used mainly in Excel.
2. How are your workflows set up? Do they depend on other MS things that don't work with anything else?
All the other stuff is no harder than moving from an older version of MS Office to a newer. I have found it is worth looking at the little apps that people built in Excel, and spending the time on the transition seeing whether they can't be refactored to use Base, since everyone will have it, or moved over to the Starbasic stuff. (Or will it work with small changes in Novell's version?)
In transition you will need to give an overabundance of help right away to the heavy duty users, and engage them even before hand. In a small situation even have them help in looking at the little hand built apps. Plus you will find out usually about a month later when people actually really use the little odd things when they get to documents and and reports that they only look at quarterly, or monthly. Be prepared for that. Try really hard to separate the grumbling that will come simply because of change, and real issues that hurt someone's job.
I am currently looking for a job (as I suppose a lot of folks are). At home we all use Macs. My Girlfriend has Apple Pages, so I decided to use it. I was astounded how easy it was to make a resumé that looked pretty good from one of the templates. So I applied for a job and sent them the Word export (as I figured word was a default filetype). Not only does the resumé look really bad, many windows users can not open it. So I exported to PDF, same. So I took it to where I work now opened with the current version of word (disaster!)... spent a while fixing it, saved it... and people have trouble opening docx files in the more common older MS Word application.
I am a scientist, not a typesetter! And I wound up doing several iterations of this to get something that older versions of MS Word (running on older versions of windows?).
So bottom line, I used Rich Text and a MS font. I blame this on MS making their applications so picky when opening various competing filetypes.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
It should roll out just fine. But here is a few points:
*There may be some issues with macros or VB Script on spreadsheets that use them. :)
*Impress doesn't always play nice with PowerPoint presentations that use embedded windows media player stuff.
*Draw is still not able to open Publisher docs. So this could be a problem if you rely heavily on Publisher. Also its not as nice to work with yet.
*Don't forget about the extensions! Here is a list of the ones I use here when I deploy: http://blogs.frederic.k12.wi.us/paulsenj/?p=50
*You will have to deal with the "But its not Microsoft" people. This is actually the number one issue that I run into.
*If you use Outlook you will need to find something to replace it with. I would suggest a webmail system, it will make your life much easier.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
A few users who resist all change will put up a fight first. Then the local MS sales office will contact your bosses and overrule you. If that fails they will back a truck load of money and essentially give you MSOffice07 for free and some more freebies. If that too fails, MSFT will buy your small business and fire you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We did a pilot project at my workplace (800-1000 users, pilot of ~30) and everything went smoothly because we gave a course to all. Message: factor some training for all users in the transition costs.
To answer the specific question: OO.o can save in .doc/.xls format, only macros are of concern (I did not test that). As for communicating with others without OO.o, making PDFs is the way to guarantee page layout, and it's free! People loved that feature, spared the hassle of procuring Acrobat licences.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I struggle with OO calc not responding to keyboard shortcuts or simple operations in the same way that Excel does. I wish I could find a shortcut / config file for OO that made it "behave" like excel.
I *like* having CTRL+SHIFT++ inserting a row or column. I like the delete key deleting the value of a cell without giving me a pop-up window. Is there any project or resource out there that makes calc (and other OO apps) "behave" as close to MS office as possible without having to configure it yourself for an entire evening?
If you're exchanging MS Office docs -- particularly ones going through multiple editions of MSWord, it is a commonplace for MS to claim the docs are corrupt and refuse to do anything. Frequently, OpenSource tools like OpenOffice.org or AbiWord read the files perfectly well, and then can save them un-corrupted in ".doc" form. My wife is an attorney, and she has to jump through that hoop all the time.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I tried converting an office of about 25-30 people to Open Office and I can assure you that it will not be smooth. Now this was about 3? years ago, so I'm sure Open Office has improved greatly, and will make the job easier, but the problems I encountered were:
1) A general reluctance to move off of what they knew;
2) Concern that customers would not be able to communicate (whether the concern was valid or not);
3) Lack of training on Open Office. Everything is not the same and unfortunately users are not willing or able to work it out for themselves;
4) Some modules just were not as good as the Office modules particularly where there were heavy users or Powerpoint or Excel.
My recommendation isn't that you don't do it though. Its that you find a few people (5 or so) who will test and try and gently roll it out through the organisation, who are open to new things and who can act as "go to" people for others as you roll it our further.
I'd also be at pains to get the expert Powerpoint and Excel users to use it with some of their current presentations or spreadsheets to be certain that it works for them, and if not just say no problem and let them go on using what works.
I've found that people don't like change, and change unfortunately needs to be gradual, if its to succeed.
Since it costs nothing to try, why not download a copy and try opening several examples and try saving several examples (and testing if you can "round trip" the documents.)
There are some documents which used some features which wouldn't come across (specialized formatting stuff,) when it was tried at one of my employers/clients.
For most (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) it was okay.
The database is way too primitive (so is Microsoft's so no loss there) so we rolled our own and we used specialized drawing tools.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
To get the full value out of OpenOffice, think about going beyond merely swapping out Word. If you take advantage of some of OpenOffice's unique features, it might get you a quicker ROI.
For example, I once had to pull together the technical response to a large RFP. We had over a dozen authors. Rather than shlepping copies of the whole response doc back and forth to everyone (my nightmare scenario), I used Open Office's Master Document feature to create a live, compound document: a Master Document for the entire response, and a separate Chapter Document for each section. Since the Chapters were separate documents, the various authors could work on them independently. Once a week I would refresh the Master Document, which would automatically pull in all the work thus far.
This worked really well, and the way Open Office cleanly separated the master from the sub-documents was very impressive. The point is, we got a lot of bang for the buck out of that experience, and that one project pretty much sold everyone on the value of making the switch to Open Office.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Every time I try to migrate users at my company from MS Office to OpenOffice, the story is the same. They accept it at first, but a week or a month later, they come back to me and say "Some of my word files don't work right in my office. can you give me the same version that [name] has?" where [name] is the name of a person who still have MS Office 2002 on their computer.
When I try to track down specific complaints, I usually find a subtle formatting problem that breaks a table over a page boundary, or makes an awkwardly formatted page, or a font that ends up making a particular line of text just one pixel wider than it used to be causing a reflow. Stuff like that.
I get *almost* the same reaction from people when I try to upgrade them to MS Office 2007. (with higher emphasis on "I can't find feature X" and lower emphasis on "this document formats wrong")
What your company does, But it seems likely to me that there might be many workers who are simple to transition and a few that would be insanely hard.
Why not give everyone OO.o and mandate exclusive use of OO.o for most people that really don't need office but leave some room for the guys that are having problems to use office 2000.
Eventually, office2000 will obsolete itself, and if OO.o truly is a suitable replacement, people will adopt it willingly. For the hard core two or three that justifiably can't move, update them to office 2007, but leave them with OO.o as well.
If OO.o is not suitable for everyone then why hold the company back by mandating it across the board.
Finally, you could split up the packages, ie. use OO.o word processor, GNUmeric and powerpoint.
Nullius in verba
By *buying* something to fix something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place. Awesome.
I know if it was me I wouldn't necessarily trust what I read on Slashdot.
At a minimum I would do the following:
1. Open and check many documents in my organization. If possible I would ask people in the business to help with this.
2. I would see if any documents had any macros or God forbid DDE, OLE or VB macros in them. If so I would see how hard it would be to convert them or look at what Novell offers to help with that.
3. I would do a small pilot group with both Microsoft and OO installed to test.
4. If all went well with the pilot group I would remove Microsoft Office from their workstations and test some more.
5. If all that went well I would expand the rollout to more of the company. I would probably save sales for last.
At some point I would have cheat sheets developed and possibly offer some training for the people. I would probably try and do this as early as possibly but expect to change the training depending on feedback from the pilot group.
Having said all this, you will probably find some things that don't work as well and others that will work better. This is the nature of the beast. My personal experience running OO is that it is very good, and we migrated years ago. My experience "may" be totally different than someone who uses Microsoft Office a ton. I will say that when I first tried it in our organization (old org), the employees HATED it. I was a bit surprised on the amount of hate for a Office product... The weird part was that we found out it was because we told them that they were loosing Microsoft Office. When we changed our wording from "removing Microsoft Office" to "upgrading to the latest version of Office" the general attitude changed considerably. Suddenly most of the people said they loved it. Weird, but my experience.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I didn't participate in such transitions, but one of my past employers did such migration already in OO.o 1.x times.
They have employed rather pragmatical approach and made (partial) migration in several phases. At first they mandated that all employees have OOo installed. Then whole R&D (and all of internal documentation) migrated to OO.o. That was rather painful yet rewarding. Then those who didn't need M$O ditched it. At the end of migration we had most of personnel using OO.o (rather successfully; it's when I joined the company) - only of sales (minority in engineering company) and test department were using simultaneously OO.o and M$O.
I'd rate OO.o for technical purposes higher than M$O since many features in former are implemented much simpler than their counterparts in M$O. Comparing old documentation M$O template with newer OO.o template I found that OO.o template was missing all the black magic people had to employ to make derived M$O documents easy to edit. OO.o's outlines alone were saving lots of time. Export to PDF was beautifully solving problem of communication with business partners.
All in all, I'd say, that using OO.o internally is pretty easy. Yet company has to be ready to have also number of M$O installations to be able to read/edit documents from partners. Hinting your partners that you are using internally OO.o and PDF/SWX/ODF are preferred formats might lead to some nice surprises: many companies at least pilot OO.o internally and pretty happy to send you documents in your preferred format.
And piece of advise: do NOT mix OO.o and M$O documents: binary .DOC format compatibility is all but myth. Implement OO.o where you can clearly draw a line between internal confidential documents and external/public documents.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Our company switched over to OOo around 2.1 (we just got 3.0 not long ago). Our company has two home offices, one in the states & and in South American. We have several hundred locations worldwide. At first it was a tough sell & to be honest I was not a fan. However, I, along with fellow coworkers in the field, have grown to really appreciate it. In fact, it is all I use at home & at work. I didn't even bother installing MS office on my last PC build. Most, if not all, of the home office users have both OOo & MS office. Occasionally a file will come down the pipe that we can't open, but the second try saved in OOo format works. I can't say much for Power Point as we mainly deal in with the standard word/excel files, or calc/writer if you will. Bottom line, yes you can switch over, but expect some heavily used files not to transfer over flawlessly. Expect users to bitch, but after they're seasoned it'll be just another program.
Don't ever expect migrating from MS is going to be smooth, MS' is software that is designed to screw you up for migrating to something else, expect some pains and costs, that's right, there are gonna be costs, that's the problem with MS software, the bill is usually bigger in the long term.
Also Lol @ the guy that seemed to advertize Novell's fork of open office because it had OOXML filters. News flash: so does Sun's OOo 3.0 ...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"