Can a Small Business Migrate Smoothly To OpenOffice.org v3? 503
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.)
Not a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
Our office of 50+ transitioned back in the early 2.0 days with nary a hitch. A couple of people still have MS Office for specific compatibility reasons (certain spreadsheet macros, that sort of thing) but everyone else from IT to the receptionist has OOo. We spent approximately $0.00 on training, instead going with "here's your new word processor". People who need office suites picked up on it quickly and people who primarily do other things didn't really care.
We did it. (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not that hard. As other posts say, there will be whiners who don't like change. "Why do we have to do this?" Blah, blah, blah. The reality is that within the organization you don't need MS Office at all. You will only need it for those times when you need to edit docs with others in the outside world. What we did was to make sure we had a couple of machines with Office on them as well as OpenOffice. Office was only used when it absolutely had to be, with all internal docs being OO. Most of the time we would export our OO docs to PDF's and ship those outside of the company. If we needed to ship out a doc to a law firm or some other such entity where it needed to be edited, we would convert the OO to Word and then ship it out, keep it in Word for the edits, and then convert back to OO at the very end (or not, depending). If the whole world used OO, you wouldn't even need to do that. But that can only come when everyone has already done what we've done and you plan to do. I say go for it and save some cash. You won't regret it.
Why not both? (Score:5, Interesting)
Case study in pub ed: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:i don't see any problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Gnumeric vs Calc (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Short and long answers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Users fear change.
Tell them they are getting an upgraded version of office.
True enough, less fear, less whining, and less pain for you.
Too Many Filetypes / Too Much Incompatability (Score:5, Interesting)
I am currently looking for a job (as I suppose a lot of folks are). At home we all use Macs. My Girlfriend has Apple Pages, so I decided to use it. I was astounded how easy it was to make a resumé that looked pretty good from one of the templates. So I applied for a job and sent them the Word export (as I figured word was a default filetype). Not only does the resumé look really bad, many windows users can not open it. So I exported to PDF, same. So I took it to where I work now opened with the current version of word (disaster!)... spent a while fixing it, saved it... and people have trouble opening docx files in the more common older MS Word application.
I am a scientist, not a typesetter! And I wound up doing several iterations of this to get something that older versions of MS Word (running on older versions of windows?).
So bottom line, I used Rich Text and a MS font. I blame this on MS making their applications so picky when opening various competing filetypes.
Re:Aged software may be your ally this time (Score:2, Interesting)
Office 2000 was released 27 Jan 1999. In one week, it will be a full decade old.
Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Short and long answers? (Score:3, Interesting)
You're joking, but this can be a serious deterrent to switching for some businesses.
Of course, vital business logic being locked away in an Excel macro is a WTF in and of itself, but sometimes there's no getting around it...
Keybaord Shorcuts are an issue (Score:3, Interesting)
I *like* having CTRL+SHIFT++ inserting a row or column. I like the delete key deleting the value of a cell without giving me a pop-up window. Is there any project or resource out there that makes calc (and other OO apps) "behave" as close to MS office as possible without having to configure it yourself for an entire evening?
Re:Entirely Depends On Your Integration (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're missing a point.
For many slashbots, "common" == those folks who agree with what I think is important, appropriate, or valuable. So, if you need VBscripts or mailmerge, you're out there on the fringe.
A corollary group of slashbots, zealots, extend this to mean that "If my chosen software package doesn't do it, it doesn't ever need to be done. If you think you need it, think again, because you're wrong and stupid."
We need to be honest with the shortfalls of Free or Open software, because love it or hate it, the market leader has pioneered and obscenely large feature set and you can't compete unless you're trying to support the really important ones. The ones that get used in settings outside of Mom's basement, that is.
Re:Short and long answers? (Score:5, Interesting)
But calling your users Luddites and worse sure ain't the way to go.
But he wasn't saying that all protesters were Luddites. I totally agree with everything you said, but also understand his frustration about people who protest all change, regardless of how carefully planned or coordinated with the end users, seemingly for the sake of having something to complain about. Those were the people he is railing against.
Re:Short and long answers? (Score:2, Interesting)
pretty easy to justify I think since the new Office is so different from previous versions. It would almost be a logical point to switch from Office.
However, another issue that can't be overlooked is the compatibility with existing files. There are kinks to how OO.o presents files in the Office formats. The ease of switching may depend largely on how many existing documents you have and the complexity of their formatting. I think I would identify this as the primary issue given that training will need to happen with the new Office or OO.o.
Re:Outlook? (Score:1, Interesting)
Try Zimbra. It easily replaces Outlook and Exchange with more features and less downtime and administrative headaches. It also come with good virus and spam filtering on the server side, integrates with Blackberries and other mobile devices and can also integrate with third party applications and applicances, like phone systems, crm packages, and more...
MS Office file corruption (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Short and long answers? (Score:2, Interesting)
Short: Actually, no.
Medium: Really, I mean it, you're wrong.
Long: I work in an environment in which we have a mix of OO.O users (typically on Mac OS X Leopard) and MS Office users (a combination of Mac OS X Leopard, Windows Vista, and Windows XP in virtual and native environments). Those of us using MS Office have no trouble with document interchange, except when it comes to the XML vs. binary file formats (older MS office users can't read/open the .xlsx or .docx formats, for example).
Folks on OO.O wind up corrupting files on a regular basis. I'll create a document, send it to an OO.O users for comment, and get back a document with a blue background ... that the OO.o user doesn't know was there, and can't figure out how to remove.
Retraining habits is one thing, but with OO.O you have to settle for a buggy system that can corrupt your files. Small businesses often work for large businesses, and the file interchange with my clients has to be seamless. I had better luck with Apple's iWork than I do with OO.O, but have given up on both in favor of MS Office.
This is a pretty easy business decision. MS Office is $150, and it works. OO.O is free, but I have to spend a couple hours of my time in any given month dealing with some headache it presents. So that means that MS Office is actually cheaper that OO.O.
Hear that OO.O? Come up with software that works well, and I'll jettison MS Office. And so will lots of other businesses.
Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o (Score:3, Interesting)
However in my exp I have found the less a user knows about computers the more crazy formats they will use in Word.
Re:Yes, yes, and yes. (Score:3, Interesting)
On another note, isn't it funny that every time Apple came out with a new OS that wasn't very backward compatible but rather made a large step forward, they were praised for doing so. Each time MS made a small step forward and kept compatibility, they were cursed. Now they make a big step forward and are still cursed. I'm convinced that the only way MS could ever be praised is if they were the size of Apple (the underdog) and had really cool marketing. If you've made the change personally to 2007, you will find that there is a lot to like about it. The Office suite still runs circles around OO and probably always will.
Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o (Score:3, Interesting)
And for the record, wtf is a WordArt object doing in a spreadsheet anyway? I don't know who's more stupid - the user who feels the need to add such BS to a business document, or the developers who thought that allowing a user to put such crap in a spreadsheet was a great idea.
I only wish this were the exception, rather than the rule. I had the "controller" (I use quotes because he's not a CPA, though he more or less manages the finances here) ask me today if it was possible to jruy-rig our multifunction copier to work with the color toner cartridges removed, because the cost per page for copying or printing in color was too high, and he didn't trust users to print only in black and white.
Re:OpenXML Plug-In Exists for Novell's OO.o (Score:4, Interesting)
you don't say (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not give everyone OO.o and mandate exclusive use of OO.o for most people that really don't need office but leave some room for the guys that are having problems to use office 2000.
Eventually, office2000 will obsolete itself, and if OO.o truly is a suitable replacement, people will adopt it willingly. For the hard core two or three that justifiably can't move, update them to office 2007, but leave them with OO.o as well.
If OO.o is not suitable for everyone then why hold the company back by mandating it across the board.
Finally, you could split up the packages, ie. use OO.o word processor, GNUmeric and powerpoint.
Re:MS Office file corruption (Score:3, Interesting)
Frequently, OpenSource tools like OpenOffice.org or AbiWord read the files perfectly well, and then can save them un-corrupted in ".doc" form. My wife is an attorney, and she has to jump through that hoop all the time.
Lawyers make a lot of use of change tracking. Word does a horrible job in this area and frequently corrupts files, especially when editing with multiple versions (which you do when exchanging draft documents). OpenOffice 3 does a much better job of change tracking in every conceivable way but the problem is the other side is most likely using Word and won't even know what OpenOffice is. The corruption fix via OpenOffice works but change tracking information is likely to be altered in the process and you lose automatic cross references to numbered paragraphs in the process (Ooo 3.0 has them but does not import them from Word documents).
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
We Did (Score:2, Interesting)
LoL @ "smoothly" (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't ever expect migrating from MS is going to be smooth, MS' is software that is designed to screw you up for migrating to something else, expect some pains and costs, that's right, there are gonna be costs, that's the problem with MS software, the bill is usually bigger in the long term.
Also Lol @ the guy that seemed to advertize Novell's fork of open office because it had OOXML filters. News flash: so does Sun's OOo 3.0 ...