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Deploying Open Office? 74

Posted by Cliff from the trial-by-fire dept.
scubacuda asks: "I've mass deployed OpenOffice at work. Of the 40 computers running, ALL are running OpenOffice (only about 5 are running Microsoft Office in addition). I'm quite surprised at how well-received the deployment has been thus far: secretaries seem to be pleased with how well it integrates with Avery labels, it converts to/from Microsoft Office DOC/XLS files, etc. Have any other slashdotters implemented OpenOffice in an enterprise environment? If so, what have been the reactions from users and management?"
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Deploying Open Office? More

Deploying Open Office?

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  • Question...

    How many users did you deploy to?
    Are we talking a 50 person 'enterprise' or are we talking about thousands of users?

  • 40? (Score:3)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Thursday September 12, 2002 @09:12AM (#4243982)

    40 PC's hardly constitutes an Enterprise. It would be an entirely different story if you had 5k+ desktop users to install to, support, and make happy.
    • It would be an entirely different story if you had 5k+ desktop users to install to, support, and make happy.

      As if you can make 5,000+ people happy with a single solution. That's something I'd like to see..
    • 40 PC's hardly constitutes an Enterprise. It would be an entirely different story if you had 5k+ desktop users to install to, support, and make happy.

      Damn right. 40 PCs is a small enough network that you can install new software by hand, and 40 users are a small enough community that they can just wander into your office when they've got a problem.

      An "enterprise" deployment would be an unattended installation on several thousand desktops in multiple locations, possibly in multiple countries. If it goes wrong, hundreds of people might find themselves unable to do any useful work, and you can't fix it without doing another mass deployment.

      • Re:40? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rick the Red ( 307103 )
        Oh, I don't know about that. I manage a seven computer network (my home) and I use DHCP because I hated having to configure the TCP settings every time something changed (you know, like when I had to re-load Windoze yet again, or when I chose to re-load Linux yet again :-)

        And if his 40 PC network goes down he's effectively shut down the entire company, so size is relative. Also, if he manages his 40 PC network as if it were a 10,000 PC network he's probably able to take a two-week vacation and really relax; if he's loaded everything by hand he's gonna jump every time the phone rings.

        The project I'm on now is specifically targeted to "enterprise" customers, defined as five or more employees (many Fortune 500 companes are our customers, so when I say "or more" I mean really huge). "Enterprise" means the customer depends on our product working, as opposed to "consumer" where the customer is mearly inconvenienced if it doesn't work. Think the difference between consumer and business DSL. The funny thing is the consumer generally pays more, because enterprises get a volume discount!

        • While I admittedly loose in my definition of "enterprise", you're right: if it didn't go over well, my ass would have been grass. I'm the only IT guy--the guy who does the website, desktop support, router, phone system, etc. If things didn't go well, it would have put a BIG DENT in all other operations.

  • I'm using it now (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gruturo ( 141223 ) on Thursday September 12, 2002 @09:18AM (#4244019)
    I am manager of a project with 5 staff. Before shoving it down the throat of my people, I wanted to use it myself and see if it's really usable/stable/reliable/compatible....

    (I have quite a bit of unix/linux background, detonating kernels and X servers for some 10 years, not your average newbie)

    It's Ugly and Slow.
    I'm still using because I don't want to shell $$$ to Micro$oft which is rich enough already, but it's unpleasant when it takes 14 seconds to start on a P3-850 w/ 256MB. I more often end up moving the document to a PC with Office, working there, then taking it back, using OO only as an emergency.

    Only recently I discovered AbiWord and it was instant love: 3MB installer, small memory footprint, starts in a flash, and it's NICE!!!!

    OO is soooo unsexy (and memory-hungry) that I avoid using it whenever possible. Its UI definitely needs some work, not even the scroller on my touchpad works in it (it does in AbiWord and in everything else).

    If only there was some usable Excel replacement for the Win32 platform (Yes I'm running Win2K on all office PCs. No Linux, sorry, it's not really ready yet for the desktop.) a la gnumeric, I think OO would disappear rather quickly from my PC.

    • Re:I'm using it now (Score:2, Informative)

      by Tesseract ( 107713 )
      I've been using OpenOffice for several months in a very MS-biased shop. Running on a 1.7P4 w/512, both office applications start blank in under 3 seconds. Specifically, I have a document where I track the email throughput on my linux gateways. Since others look at this document, I have always saved in MS format by default and it takes about 22 seconds to load. For s&g, I saved a copy in OO (sxc) and it takes 9 seconds to load. Opening with Excel in native format takes 4 seconds. So, in premilinary testing, yes, OO does take a bit longer to load, even in native format. The question then becomes, is it $400+ faster? Deciding the answer is a task left to the reader.
      Also, the xls document is 605K, while the same doc saved in OO is 68K. Zipping these docs yields sizes of 50K and 64K respectively. So who's format is more efficient?
    • Ever considered using Linux (or another Unix, if you like) on an application server? Just put XFree86 for Cygwin on your Windows desktops, and then you can switch between Unix/Windows at will by just pressing Alt+Tab.
    • The big strength of OpenOffice is how well it handles microsoft files.

      GoBe is pretty cool, its is cross platform and pretty lean but not Open Source yet ...
      http://freeradicalsoftware.com/

      If you are really interested in Gnumeric on windows perhaps you should offer a small financial incentive to the developers. Allegedly they have worked very hard to cleanly seperate out the functions into libraries and a port to windows should be doable. If i recall there just is no one particularly interested in doing the necessary work of porting it but it is not impossible and the maintainer Jody Goldberg is not the kind of insecure fool to complain at the mere suggestion.
      http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnumeric-list/200 1- March/msg00041.html
    • It's Ugly and Slow.

      It can be ugly all right....

      Ant it can be slow.

      However, these can be remedies relatively easily. There is a wuickstart service that can run on Windows and something similar for *nix which keeps the common components loaded. I think that if you use this and get some good fonts, this will go along way toward your user experience.
      • The quickstart for windows is part of the OOo package.

        The quickstart for linux is here [sourceforge.net]

        I just installed it on my gnome desktop and it speeded the load of Writer from 25s to 5s. Yes I know those times suck, my box is a bit busy right now & I desperately need to invest in new hardware (or a cluster of old hardware ;) ) Look at the improvement though! Cracking package, hope it proves to be stable.
    • I believe that the reason M$ office is fast is there is a process (OSA*.exe) that starts up and loads office code into memory. So while offices app start fast they are cheating. Similar to the situation with Mozilla and its fast start. Everyone compared it to IE but IE gets loaded up at login.
  • for me. All of the office suites today have too many features, most of them useless to me. They come with too many thigns also. I just want a word processor and a Pagemaker/Publisher type program. That's it. I do use OpenOffice, but only because its free and compatible with other things. One good thing I can say about it is that it saved me from Star Office 6.
    When SO6 was Beta and free I was using it. I wrote some important documents in it. Then the beta expired and I couldn't read the documents in anything I had. So I got OpenOffice and I was able to read my important files.
    Does anyone know about a lite word processor/pagemaker for win2k that has more features than wordpad (i.e: spellcheck, autocomplete, etc) but none of the useless features of other offices (the stuff that makes OpenOffice take forever to start up)??
    • All of the office suites today have too many features, most of them useless to me.

      Ahh, yes, the program that has only features _I_ need. We all want that, don't we. Now tell me exactly which features you want:

      • Proper font handling
      • Proper layout of text
      • and images...
      • ...in combination?
      • Proper page handling (margins, paper-sizes, one-sided or two-sided, etc...)
      • Handles printing well
      • Tables, multiple columns, etc...
      • Outlines
      • Crossreferences
      • TOC
      • references...
      • Intuitive GUI
      • Spellchecker
      • large documents
      • macros
      • extension language
      • import export from common fileformats

      Oops, it seems I forgot one feature of yours I don't use myself (autocomplete). Well, better make the openoffice guys create a specialized version with exactly your features. That's gonna be much better, right?

      The problem with free office-type programs today isn't the bloat from added features (hell, emacs has more features than most programs, but that doesn't mean I will not use it as my texteditor!). The problem is that they are relatively new, unstable, missing lot's of features, and has a too small userbase to be interesting for a newcomer (and by definition have almost no interest to a hacker).

      • Well why not? How about writing a modular program? Isn't that part of what Object Oriented programing is all about anyway? Maybe have a configuration program that the user can run to click on which modules the applications will load on startup. Could even get really sick with it and have things that load dynamically, IE: spell check. I don't generally run spell check until I am finishing up a document and starting to profread. I think Apache does a fair job with this.
        • I don't generally run spell check until I am finishing up a document and starting to profread.

          And sometimes you don't run a spellcheck at all...
          • Perhaps you didn't notice, but the Slashdot spellchecker sux. Cut, paste, check, cut, paste. Ugh!

            • I realize that nobody is gonna read this, but if you have MS Office and IE installed, check out this little script over at pcmag.com

              http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,428392,00.a sp

              Following the instructions gives you a javascript button that will take any selected text, paste it into Word, spell check, then ask if you want to put it back into your browser, and close Word again. It's pretty spiffy.
    • It's called AbiWord. I refer you to Google for all additional information.
  • and apart from its slow startup I find it fine.

    However I'm only using the wordprocessor part to keep format compatable with other in the department who use MS Word
  • It feels like its aobut where office 97 was. Kinda klunky, not all the functionalty of office 2000/xp, but find it quite useable. The only holdout for me is MsExcel, the only program that Microsoft ever did right(sorta). AS for useability, it works the same as MsOffice for all intents and purposes, and seems to lack all the crap that MS tries to shove down your throat, like bizzarre ways to format and the damned paperclip. I like it, and my issuse between this and Excel may disappear once i learn more of the functions.
    • "It feels like its aobut where office 97 was. Kinda klunky, not all the functionalty of office 2000/xp, but find it quite useable."

      Funny, because I've recently downgraded my Office 2000 installation to Office 97 because I miss all of the klunkiness and simplicity. Moreover, I find it simply more responsive. I found Office XP on some of our newer machines to be utter crap that just gets in your way. I may give OO a try, but since Office is bought and paid for, there is little incentive for me at this time.
  • I've been using OOo for some time now to do all of my work at the office, and I quite like it. The word compatibility is good, but not perfect. On even relatively simple documents with embedded graphics, headers / footers, or text that has been rotated it has some minor conversion problems, but nothing that is a show-stopper for me.
    I am currently working to get the school district I work for to adopt Star Office 6, since it is almost as free for us as OOo is for everyone else, and we get the backing of Sun, should anything go Horribly Horribly Wrong(TM), which makes the administration more comfortable.
    My biggest hurdle at this point is the large installed base of Corel WordPerfect Suite 8 users. Anyone know of a win32 program that converts from Wordperfect format to something more usable relatively reliably?

    • StarOffice 6.0 does have a WordPerfect filter. I believe that it is licensed from another company, so Sun cannot migrate the filter to OpenOffice.

      See this thread [slashdot.org] in a previous discussion for links to the StarOffice blurb as well as a link to a project for WordPerfect support in OpenOffice.


  • StarOffice works great. I'm using all-linux outside the office.

    But, StarOffice isn't quite what you might be looking for...
  • Deploying any text-based programs more complex than notepad has an adverse effect on collective self-esteem and inspires feelings of inadequacy and horror in some scenarios.
  • it's already half loaded. C'mon guys, why do you measure how fast something is based on how fast it starts? do your useage habits consist of launching it, looking at a document for 30 seconds, and then closing it again, or do you use some of it's features? are these features slow? so maybe it's slow to start because it's too polite to use your system resources _all_ the time just in case you want to launch it in 5 seconds.

    • That is an increadibly good point... one of the first things I do with any software package I install is remove the "Quick Launch" program from my Start Up folder; I tend to run older computers, and don't need the overhead of of a dozen little programs running in the background so that Word or Mozilla may load a wee bit faster, if I decide to run either on that day.

      By not running Palm's HotSync, PGP, Office's Fast Start, Mozilla's Fast start, the AOL system tray, and various printer programs on startup I reclaim about 25% of the resources (as reported by Resource Meter) on my PC (Dell Optiplex P200 64MB RAM).

    • This isn't a good point. I have office not pre-loading at all--I manually checked all running processes in task manager (winxp, Ctrl+alt+delete screen). No office things. I start MS words. Up and running in 3 seconds. End of story. AbiWord is even faster.
      • Do recall, however, that Windows XP loads a bunch of stuff that MS Office at boot time. Things you don't see in Task Manager like DLLs. Open Office loads it's own versions when it starts. This is a good point, and you can't compare Microsoft programs on Microsoft OSs with non-Microsoft programs on the same OS.
        • This is a good point, and you can't compare Microsoft programs on Microsoft OSs with non-Microsoft programs on the same OS.

          This is a valid point but what alternative is there for an IT manager catering for Windows users?

          In the real world, if the options are Microsoft Office running on Windows 98/2000/XP or Open Office running on Windows 98/2000/XP then nothing's going to change the fact that, to the end user, Microsoft's suite launches faster and thus appears to run quicker.

          I really respect IT managers who are making the transition from Micosoft's suite to the open source alternative. We're all naturally suspicious of change - it's a basic instinct - and your average PC user is no exception. Users who bend over backwards to avoid "learning" how to use a new piece of software are all too common and two or three of these can really eat up a helpdesk's time.

          Let's face it, transitioning difficult users from one revision of Microsoft Office to another is often hard enough - transitioning them from Microsoft Office to Open Office must be like trying to push water uphill.

          I'm not saying that such transitioning shouldn't be done - of course it should, and not just because of the cost implications - but what I am saying is that it isn't always an easy task.

          But focusing on how Microsoft's OS architecture is favoured towards their own applications isn't going to help sell end users on the merits of Open Office; it's just a big red herring. Better that you just acknowledge that Open Office does take a few seconds longer to load but affirm that it's just as fast (if not faster) and just as reliable (if not more reliable) in operation.

          That last point alone will sell most of the doubters - after all, we've all lost a document or two to a crashing application and anything that will reduce the frequency of such crashes is officially A Good Thing.

          In summary if you play down the startup speed and just focus on the application and it's benefits to the end user then you'll do just fine.
          • This is a valid point but what alternative is there for an IT manager catering for Windows users?

            You're absolutely right, of course, and I would never suggest to the contrary. We have to "sell" Open Office on its merits over the competition, not on the philosophy of the company that made it. Fortunately, I don't have to sell the idea to anyone (yet). :)
        • Do you have any evidence of this? I'm quite sure I have OFFICE autoloading nothing at windows boot, and I'm not sure how or why XP would boot office intrinsically, since they are two different products and not always installed together.
          • There are many common libraries in the Windows architecture. Many of these are loaded at boot time. Being a Windows-specific app, MS Office probably makes better use of these, where Open Office may not make as good use of them in order to gain its cross-platform compatibility. It is these libraries that are common to all Microsoft apps that gain MS Office the load time gain.
      • Do you really think that MS wants you to see that office bloat is already loaded in the background. XP hides lots of things. I am sure there are 10 things running eating up resources in XP.
    • I just installed OOo 1.0.1 on windows having being impressed with it on Linux, and it has a Quickstart feauter - so this should help with startup times...

  • Tried and abandoned (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 12, 2002 @12:29PM (#4245320)
    Before even attempting this in our office of about 60 workers we took a sample of around 50 word documents and tested each for template compatibility, macro safety, embedded object handling, printed output, faxed output, HTML conversion, spelling, preservation of tables, lists, you name it... It passed that OK and we moved on to the next phase, which was testing about 10 **HUGE** excel files for problems between formulas, macros, printed output, charts, etc. etc... the results were acceptable. PowerPoint was not as important but it passed those acceptably as well. In addition to all of these internal tests we had to mail some files to frequent clients and suppliers to make sure we weren't breaking anything with our partners, and apart from one or two glitches everything was a go (not like there are never glitches with "real" office anyway).

    So finally we rolled everything out one weekend, uninstalling MS Office in the process.

    After three days we were back to re-installing Office 97 everywhere, because we found to our surprise that *nobody* could work without the paper clip.

  • Good-ish experiences (Score:4, Informative)

    by Snafoo ( 38566 ) on Thursday September 12, 2002 @12:50PM (#4245489) Homepage
    My office is divided between the savvy Engineering department, which uses Linux and gcc for development and, believe it or not, groff for written stuff, and the Sales department, which used to use MSOffice 97. Due to extensive lobbying by the lead engineer, and some incompatibilities between Office97 and 2000, when the hour came for an upgrade we seized the opportunity to switch sales and management to an OO-based environment.

    The results so far are that:

    (1) Some unexpected people are going to _need_ MS Office, point-blank. The popular financial package we use only 'exports' data to Excel. Not excel file formats; just Excel (via OLE or COM or whatever they're calling it this week.) Although it has a 'print to CSV' feature (don't ask), it saves the file with some silly Lotus-specific extension that OpenOffice doesn't believe is actually a CSV file. Although renaming should in principle be easy, the people who need to use this data are simply not up to the task of understanding (a) why they need to set their folder options to show all those funny little three-letter thingies at the end of the filename, and (b) why they can't just click the 'Excel' button like they used to. So the people that need to regularly manipulate the data in the financial database at a relatively low level need MSO. Also, upper management simply adores Outlook, so you might have to appease them with the real mccoy. So buy a couple of copies of MSO, just in case.

    (2) Many other people won't notice the switch. (Seriously!) Or, at least until they try to open a heavily-formatted word document sent to them from someone outside the company, which leads to point

    (3). Always install the freely-downloadable viewers for Office documents, which are available for free on MS' website, and make sure that they map to the MSO filetypes. Really, the Word-document import engine of OO is not yet up to snuff, and the spreadsheet (although very, very close in quality and feel to Excel) barfs in some strange places where Excel is still (perversely) happy. For instance, if you cut and paste a column of cells into a column absolutely referenced by the formulae in those cells, it becomes self-referential and then, in the judgement of both reason and OpenOffice, should display an error. However, Excel will simply display the original contents of the cells before they were copied, and silently ignores the formulae. OO's is obviously the theoretically correct response, but many of the (ahem) generalists in Sales have a hard time understanding what, precisely, they're copying, and Excel's behaviour often gives them what they want despite their incompetence. This is just one small fruit on the tree grown of the millions of dollars spent by Microsoft on focus-group testing and UI design, which is still growing and bearing dividends. OpenOffice has a formidable competitor, even if it is overpriced.

    (4) Consider using StarOffice, which is cheap (although not free, obviously) and handles Word and Excel documents better. Or, wait for whatever it is that 'GoBe Productive' is metamorphosing into, which I have not tried and cannot speak knowledgably about.
    • Folks,

      I'm seeing a lot of negative comments about MSO document conversion here, which I find surprising. I use OpenOffice.org exclusively, as do two of my clients, and all of us trade back and forth documents with MSO users all the time. The problems I've found are limited to:

      1. Floating text boxes and lists in Word, two areas I will point out have problems converting between versions of Word as well.

      2. Page formatting/header/footer stuff in Word where there are numerous section breaks. This is something we need to work on.

      3. Dealing with unsupported fonts. Another area that could be smoother.

      So, we still have some issues, but on my testing our conversions to/from MSO are better that WP Office or Mac:Office.

      If, however, you have documents that do *not* agree with the above, how about joining the OpenOffice.org project and filing some issues so that we can debug? We're reverse engineering, here, folks, give us some help!

      -Josh Berkus
      OpenOffice.org

    • (1) Some unexpected people are going to _need_ MS Office, point-blank. The popular financial package we use only 'exports' data to Excel. Not excel file formats; just Excel (via OLE or COM or whatever they're calling it this week.) Although it has a 'print to CSV' feature (don't ask), it saves the file with some silly Lotus-specific extension that OpenOffice doesn't believe is actually a CSV file. Although renaming should in principle be easy, the people who need to use this data are simply not up to the task of understanding (a) why they need to set their folder options to show all those funny little three-letter thingies at the end of the filename, and (b) why they can't just click the 'Excel' button like they used to. So the people that need to regularly manipulate the data in the financial database at a relatively low level need MSO.

      Crimony, the solution to this is so easy it isn't funny. Write an OpenOffice Basic macro to look for the CSV file, rename it if necessary, get OOo to load it, maybe even automatically apply some custom formatting. You could even have it load all the CSVs at once if there are more than one.

      Want to hire me to implement that? :D I'm learning OOo macro programming and need some paying work....
      • There's extra formatting in the Excel spreadsheet, such as formulae and hidden cells, that would be impossible to add back in via a macro.

        Also, this is just one instance of random weird COM+-centric dependencies; there are others.

  • Recommend against (Score:3, Informative)

    by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Thursday September 12, 2002 @01:15PM (#4245685) Homepage
    I've used it and while its not a bad office suite The .doc/.xls compatability isn't very good; for example I had a .doc file containing nothing but text it couldn't bring in right. So I tried exporting from word .rtf and then reimporting, same thing. These guys are years away from the really hard stuff like VBA, OLE... And lets not forget that at any point Microsoft can shift the ground (and given more corporate resistance they might want to do that for reasons having nothing to do with OO).

    The other thing is that OO doesn't offer anything that Word doesn't have, except cost. By contrast LyX for example has lots of features that Word doesn't have, so it is more like comparing apples to oranges rather than cheap oranges to good oranges.

    Anyway I think it comes down to this:

    1) Does a small subset of office features cover all or almost all of your needs?

    2) Is cost a big deal?

    3) Can you handle only so-so importing?

    • These guys are years away from the really hard stuff like VBA, OLE

      So I guess you haven't realized that OOo has a complete Basic macro language like VBA built in already...

      No, it's not compatible with VBA (unfortunately) but it's definitely there.

      I believe it also has OLE like functionality too, even on Linux. Not 100% sure of the specifics though.
      • I'm talking in terms of compatability not existence of alternate features which are incompatable. The whole context of the paragraph that sentance came from was compatability.

        Once we dump compatability requirement I wonder whether it doesn't make more sense to take greater advantage of the underlying Unix. For example LyX using the underlying TeX for layout and typesetting, or using some of the powerful plug in languages for the math functions (like pari), or supporting general scripting for macros (i.e. perl, python, tk, shell, ruby...).

  • I desperately want to deploy Open/Star office in my company. My one drawback was that in a 10 minute evaluation I could not figure out if I can I create a word processing document is Star and email it to a client and have them open it?

    If not, how can I deploy this and expect my users to use it?
    • can I create a word processing document is Star and email it to a client and have them open it?
      err.. I meant to say that let's assume my clients have ms office - can they open my Open Office documents?
      I shall continue to ignore that I assumed that you would assume the client would have ms office.
      • In fact, you can even set your OOo settings to default save to whatever format you want so you don't forget to convert it before sending.
  • Use the Open Office Quick Start Applet(beta): http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooqstart/
  • Open Office works quite well for me on normal work computers, but my main production environment is a 40-person Windows 2000 Terminal Server. I had some users test it out, and we found that non-Admin users couldn't launch the apps, as it was looking for configuration files within the profile of the administrator who installed it. That, and lack of a replacement for Outlook as an Exchange email client killed the experiment. I look forward to trying again with a future version.
  • The main complaint I have about OO is that it cannot open password protected Excel files. I'm sure that this is a fairly major barrier because I bet that it is fairly common practice to password protect spreadsheets (since they typically contain sensitive financial numbers).

    I use the word processor and it appears pretty good. One nice feature is that it can print multiple pages onto one sheet of paper... (I know there's other ways)..

    Start-up speed can be a problem, the win32 version has a pre-loader, not exactly sure if the Linux one does.

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