Can a Small Business Migrate Smoothly To OpenOffice.org v3?

Pay The Piper writes "As an IT Support Technician in a small corporation, I've been tasked by one of my managers to determine the feasibility of transitioning our small 40 or 50 person office from Microsoft Office 2000 to Open Office 3.0. What are some of the problems I may run into as far as document cross compatibility? Has the Open Office suite evolved to a point that permits easy transition from Microsoft's suite? Besides the obvious 'free vs. expensive' argument, what are some of the pros and cons of transitioning? Are there any reliable ways to view/edit/save a document saved in the OpenXML format through Open Office, or are my co-workers and I still going to be stuck in Microsoftland?" (Given that company-wide rollouts take some time to implement, this early look at the features of OO.o 3.1 may have some relevance, too.)

Depends on how small

[Anonymous Coward]

As you approach planck-scale sized businesses, the smoothness of the migration breaks down.

Re:Short and long answers?

[sakdoctor]

Is there a piece of software that will tell the whiners to STFU?

Re:Short and long answers?

[homesnatch]

Yes.. Outlook has the ability to send emails for any such messages. Outlook is part of MS Office, so just make sure you have that installed.

Re:Short and long answers?

[Chabo]

Put the message inside an Excel spreadsheet that uses weird macros. If they can see it, then they're still using MS Office, and they should switch.

Re:Macros

[Chabo]

It's easy, in Perl:

s/mother/Linux/

No. You can's transition from MSOffice easily

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

No way you can transition out of MSOffice.

A few users who resist all change will put up a fight first. Then the local MS sales office will contact your bosses and overrule you. If that fails they will back a truck load of money and essentially give you MSOffice07 for free and some more freebies. If that too fails, MSFT will buy your small business and fire you.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Tubal-Cain]

Do other alternatives like WordPerfect or WordStar handle MSoffice files better?

About as well as Notepad.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically it would be binary lob or blob, since binary blob is redundant:)

Blob = binary large object

Just thought I would be annoying and point that out ;)

Re:50 people? No problem

[tyrione]

With the way financing guys have performed of late here is a perfect opportunity to blame your analysis on a broken Excel and switch products.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[Mister Whirly]

Yes because everybody know files created with open source software NEVER get corrupted. It just isn't in their nature.

Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o

[mweather]

That describes Office docs pretty well.

Re:Short and long answers?

[blhack]

just make sure that the message is a powerpoint presentation of a scanned copy of a photograph of a screenshot of a PDF of a .tiff file created using the "Microsoft OFfice Document Image Writeer" being embedded in an iframe of a webpage that is being displayed inside of a the preview window of microsoft frontpage and you should be okay.

IN fact, you better split the screenshot into a multipart rar file, zip that into a .zip file, then tar that, then zip it again, then tar it again (so that it is twice as compressed).

Make sure that this is accessible via an attached web page containing a link to a windows share.

Am I bitter towards the users today?
No. Why?