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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?"
Like all posts about Microsoft products vs. open-source products, this post (the one you're reading right now) and its parent boil down to anecdotal evidence and personal preference. So, with the understanding that this is my opinion and not the intentional start of a flame war, read on.
What exactly about Excel makes Calc look like a joke? My anecdotal experience is that it is at least twice as fast and I can find things in fairly logical places instead of a stupid ribbon. I use Calc for eve online industry calculations, which mirror fairly closely the actual data gathering, analysis, and projection work of a real business. What's your anecdotal experience?
If your people needed training to switch from Microsoft Office to Open Office, then they also needed training to be able to use the present version of Microsoft Office vs. the previous version of Microsoft Office, which is still nothing compared to the training costs of Vista/Win7.
Two other things to consider: if you have the latest and greatest MS product, you'll be saving in a format that only that version can read (at first, anyway). If you have the latest and greatest Open Office, you'll be saving in a format that both Open Office and Microsoft Office (any fairly recent version) can read. When you switch up with MS, you'll have the inevitable horde of people saving in the new, incompatible format and customers who can't open their documents without paying the Microsoft upgrade tax.
Second, the site license is the real reason we still use Microsoft Office in business. Early adopters amongst customers or contractors will mean that someone in the enterprise needs to have the latest Microsoft offering to be able to read or convert their files. If one person needs it, why not several? If several people have it, we'd better do a site license 'cause the BSA swat team might show up for an audit. So, businesses talk themselves into the site license to avoid jackbooted thuggery. Once you have a site license, there's no reason to switch.
Besides, trying to force a switch to OO is pointless... roll it out alongside Microsoft Office and let the people with a clue get on with things while the rest lag behind.
-1 raving lunatic; +6 subGenius... Things even out...
Unfortunately, I can't help you there. We were rather underutilizing the sharepoint setup, as little more than a glorified shared drive, only with more annoying complexity.
That, combined with the fact that virtually all the document production of the department is lightly formatted near-plaintext technical documentation, with the occasional screenshot and hyperlink, also had a lot to do with making the pitch successful. Had we been 100% behind sharepoint at the time, it almost certainly would have failed. However, since we weren't putting too much effort into gettting the most out of any document management setup, I was able to sell the wiki(ended up being dokuwiki, I think) as a great "80/20 solution". Sharepoint would give you more features(and I freely acknowledged that); but required a greater level of work and buy-in than the department was giving it. The wiki would give us 80ish% of the benefits for 20% of the effort.
So far, that has been largely true. For a department of our size, the wiki lives on a tiny little VM, not consuming any CALs or licences or anything, gives us versioning and attribution for the mostly plaintext documentation/links/screenshots stuff, and supports links to an SMB share where we can store installers and documents that absolutely have to be in Word, and so forth.
Not quite as seamless; but it was fast, easy, and cheap. The fact that I could go from "nothing" to "full demo" in a little bit of spare time just helped drive that home.