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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.
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!
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.
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
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?"
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.
By *buying* something to fix something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place. Awesome.