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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?"
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.