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Convincing Your Employer To Go With FOSS?
mark72005 writes "My employer is currently looking at adopting a content management system for use by our technical support staff (primarily first-line end user support, but hopefully it will include deeper levels of support personnel eventually). The candidates are currently Plone (OSS) and Confluence (proprietary, closed-source). For those with experience in each, what arguments in favor of Plone could be made to managers more interested in pragmatism than idealism?"
Our company is even worse than that - we have shown them the cost savings of switching from Microsoft Office (Standard) to Open Office, demo'd the interoperability and the ease of switching, but because it's not Microsoft they just can't consider it "reliable".
Or maybe they just didn't buy your logic or the numbers your presented. Open office is a passable MS office replacement in only the very most basic scenarios (not going into more detail to avoid a flameware)..
It's important when winning a contract / sale / deployment / whatever that you win it for the right reasons -- merely being open source is not something businesses typically care about. When you win a contract but are not actually the best solution, you end up with a disgruntled customer that might not give that product a second chance for a very long time.
The cost of MS Office are relatively small... For a mid-size or larger company the cost of an MS Office license is about $120 or so (depends on volume and license specifics, with the purchase of a new compnter it's nearly free). Assuming that a company rebuys a license every 2 to 3 years (for upgrades) the cost per year is about $50/employee per year. Assuming that the employee is paid $35K per year, Office cost about 0.14% of their wages. (A lower percentage for higher paid employees of course). You don't need to show much of a productivity improvement to justify the MS Office investment. A day of "conversion" training will cost $175 (35,000/200 working days). That pretty much blows the cost savings.
The office chair that the employee is sitting in costs more than 2 copies of Office, yet I hear few OSS enthusiasts arguing for Open Source Office Chairs (OSOC). Yep, your company could probably save money by giving new employees the OSS equivalent of an office chair--some cinder blocks and a piece of board. But would it really save money?
Although I'm a fan of much Open Source software, I just can't make the economics of replacing MS Office work.