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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.
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.
And it seems like a press release because there is actually a 3rd enterprise option: Google Docs. I mean, if you're going to investigate solutions, actually look around.
It matters a lot. For example what is the price that MS gave on office for that city, did they give it to them for free now to do so? Then that would matter greatly.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Some people seem to be under the impression that free software is always a better choice than proprietary software. Some of the stuff released as open source software is garbage and there is often little or no incentive for those who wrote it to fix it. There is also a lot of good stuff out there with wide community support as well. I have used a lot of open source AND proprietary software and there is a lot of good and bad stuff in both camps. It is amazing to me how many people will spend many hours and extra training costs in order to get something working just so they don't have to spend $20 for a license to something else that works a lot better. If I find some really good software and the guys who built it want $50 from me for their efforts, I am happy to pay it. My time is worth something.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Who the hell uses spreadsheets for ticket management..? Anyone who has the knowledge to do that should habe the knowledge why it's an awful idea.
It helps if you actually read the comment [Crazy idea on Slashdot I know]. They weren't using Excel for ticketing. They were using Excel to create a dashboard displaying information and metrics about tickets in their actual ticketing system, which while it may not be the optimal way to do that, doesn't strike me as that unreasonable.
Nothing to see here
Which is fine, but if you're going to use such an edge case to make the claim that one suite of software is superior to the other, you're on thin ice.
If that one edge case was his entire case against Liber Office you'd have a point, however he just cited it as a single example. I expect that when it comes to features in spreadsheet apps it's a bit like search engines. The searches that make or break a search engines is not the ability to return hits for not common searches like "america's got talent winners" it's being able to return results for a large set of rare and specific searches like: "ip67 rated bulkhead mounted sma connectors" or "new old stock 1965 mustang steering box". If you talk to people who use Excel extensively to analyze data you'll quickly find that the reason they find LibreOffice lacking is not because Libreoffice is lacking basic features, it is because the Libre Spreadsheet app is unable to perform a for a wide collection of really specific 'edge' tasks that Excel can either do out of the box or for which there exist well established and professionally maintained third party Excel expansion packages. All of that is simply down to Excel having been around longer and having many more users doing a wider variety of specialised tasks that Libreoffice Calc has had and for Libreoffice Calc that boils down to the fact that gaining market share will be a long and tedious up hill struggle.