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Italian City To Dump OpenOffice For Microsoft After Four Years
An anonymous reader writes: Between 2011 and 2014, the municipality of Pesaro, Italy, trained up its 500 employees to use OpenOffice. However, last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365. According to a report from Netics Observatory (Google translation of Italian original), the city administration will be able to save up to 80% of the software's total cost of ownership by going back. The savings are largely due to the significant and unexpected deployment costs. In particular, having to repaginate and tweak a number of documents due to a lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems translated into a considerable waste of time and productivity. The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
For some product
That is a message for new organizations to start with open standards from day 1. Otherwise you will get so dependent on proprietary standards that moving out of them may never be worth again.
I am an editor of sorts. My coworkers all use MSWord 2010, and the formatting gets thrashed every time they pass a document around. Inevitably I am called to fix it, and do so by opening it in LibreOffice.
Furthermore, I would argue that retraining everybody to Microsoft's cloud docs itself constitutes "a considerable waste of time and productivity", but I guess whoever in Pesaro's IT department that got under-the-table money disagrees.
From TFA:
They didn't replace MSOffice in the first place, they had a hybrid solution, which was costly, due to compatibility issues. They should have been able to know that beforehand. msoffice doesn't play well with others, it doesn't even implement any standard format. If you absolutely need to use msoffice in some spots, you should forget about interoperating, and just use msoffice everywhere.
This is unsurprising. As you may recall, in his "3rd Treatise on Government," John Locke wrote:
How he foresaw this, I cannot imagine. But you have to admit, he was right on target. Most people who are familiar with late 20th century technology would never even think of this, since in day-to-life you rarely care about pagination, or especially if your page breaks match someone else's -- indeed you probably only rarely think in terms of "pages" at all. Yet Locke had the distant objectivity, in order to see that pagination would some day return to being an important topic, worthy of peoples' -- nay, The People's -- attention.
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even the press release cannot mention a single good reason for it except "we have been conned in the past and now must pay the price... for pagination!"
I've been doing end user stuff for years, and Microsoft Office is a de facto standard. It's not because it's the absolute best product out there, but because compatibility needs to be maintained. Most -simple- documents and spreadsheets will open in one or the other. The problem comes when you get documents created with a Word template that someone got very creative with while building it. This happens a lot in engineering organizations, places that have document control/management systems, and yes, governments. Word has never had the easiest-to-decode formatting methods; that crown still goes to WordPerfect for the closed source world, and some law firms still use it today. Little stuff like page breaks, font kerning, and special positioning that don't matter in a simple document but matter a lot in a formal contract are sometimes very hard to find and fix in Word, for example.
The reality is that even though the format sucks, everyone is used to it and works around the quirks. Is it right? No, but it happens. No one outside of scientific publication is going to advocate for regular users to write their documents in TeX for example, even though that's the perfect example of a completely open, known formatting standard.
I think open source office suites are fine as long as you don't have crazy formatting needs and you don't have to share complex documents with too many Microsoft Office users. Otherwise, like the article says, users will waste time tweaking little things in their documents instead of doing productive work. If you're a small shop that has standardized on Linux, that's fine. One of the lifeblood things the company I work for does is respond to RFPs from governments. The standard response usually needs to be added to their crazily-formatted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, and $deity help you if your use of LibreOffice is even thought of as the reason that a bid is rejected.