It all depends on what you are doing, whether its just document processing and e-mail and basic presentations, or if you are doing really complex things with it. Then, it depends on whether your company has control over the formats used, etc. If you do have control and can migrate your formats over to the openoffice, or even PDF, formats it will make your life easier.
You'll need to do brainstorming and planning to figure out all the tasks your employees use MS Office for and determine what is and isn't feasible in OOo.
If it looks possible, I would recommend doing a small test-run by switching over 5 to 10 users onto OO.o so you can demonstrate feasibility and work out as many kinks as you can before you jump into moving over all 50 workstations. That way, management knows there is an easy exit strategy and you don't waste -quite- as much time and money as you could have.
Employees will always complain about their regular lives changing, and you'll want to simply provide them with as much support as you can, so they can quickly learn and get used to the new system. In no time they'll have learnt OOo and it will go from the freaky new software to the same old.
The nice thing with OOo is you don't have to worry about open-source operating systems or anything like that, as it runs on most OS's.
Slashdot Mirror
What if the scientists have a force-field?
I don't think Microsoft ever included "users being responsible" in their paradigms.
Oh yeah, well 0.001 men with a peer-reviewed double-blinded scientific study beats Mr. Anecdote any day.
This is absolutely true.
And your mom is resting on, uh... nevermind.
It all depends on what you are doing, whether its just document processing and e-mail and basic presentations, or if you are doing really complex things with it. Then, it depends on whether your company has control over the formats used, etc. If you do have control and can migrate your formats over to the openoffice, or even PDF, formats it will make your life easier.
You'll need to do brainstorming and planning to figure out all the tasks your employees use MS Office for and determine what is and isn't feasible in OOo.
If it looks possible, I would recommend doing a small test-run by switching over 5 to 10 users onto OO.o so you can demonstrate feasibility and work out as many kinks as you can before you jump into moving over all 50 workstations. That way, management knows there is an easy exit strategy and you don't waste -quite- as much time and money as you could have.
Employees will always complain about their regular lives changing, and you'll want to simply provide them with as much support as you can, so they can quickly learn and get used to the new system. In no time they'll have learnt OOo and it will go from the freaky new software to the same old.
The nice thing with OOo is you don't have to worry about open-source operating systems or anything like that, as it runs on most OS's.