Concerns when Switching Offices to Linux and StarOffice? 38
Reezle asks: "I am a reluctant Microsoft Engineer who has a few customers sitting on the fence whether to go the XP route, or bite the bullet and switch an entire office over to Linux. I would love to assist them, and educate myself at the same time, but am unsure of the limitations of file type interoperability between MS Office, and Linux programs (Star Office is the only one I'm familiar with). I assume anything they create could be saved in formats that their business partners will be able to open (i.e. RTF), but what happens when they receive attachments encoded with Office 2000 or XP (ie DOC, XLS, PUB, etc)? I'd love to encourage them to make the switch, but would hate to see them unexpectedly cut off from the people they need to communicate with. Any help/advice would be appreciated."
translation server (Score:2, Interesting)
If you email an MS document to yourself at a Yahoo email address, you can go to the Yahoo web interface and veiw the document as html. For a small home office this is acceptable; for a bigger company, you search around in yahoo's site you can find a link to the company that provides the server that does that MStrash-to-html conversion.
But what we really need (and have been needing for a while) is a set of CGI and visual basic scripts that will allow a person to install apache on a windows2k or XP or whatever flavor of the week with the cygwin stuff, and provide a small web page that will take submitted documents, load them into the appropriate MS tool and save them as the appropriate format, and return them to the user. You can already buy this for a price, but a GPLd project along these lines would break a lot of dependancies on MS. I hate MS too much to even acquire a copy of the OS and Office and learn VB to start such a project.
Re:translation server (Score:1)
But I mostly use Star Office to simply translate the document into html; I think process the document from there using emacs, first cleaning it up quite a bit.
I also use Star Office to save
This is not the same usage mode as the average secretary in a MS shop, however.
just remember: (Score:2)
Take the plunge, to move to XP and THEN try to get out will be even harder. In a world without fences, who needs Gates?
PDF? (Score:2)
OLE/DCOM & VB are the issues. (Score:1)
The problem is that you are never dealing with a set of Word docs and templates. There will be excel spreadsheets, and powerpoint presentations. There will be custom macros, and Word-Basic extentions. Documents will be linked and embedded in each other.
In short, most microsoft offices are going to stay that way because of the interdependancies on various proprietory products and protocols.
Your best bet for getting a Linux/StarOffice solution in place is if there is nothing there already. If microsoft has got a company hooked on their corporate crack cocaine, there is very little you can do to wean them off it.
Sad to say, but true.
Depends on the number of seats (Score:2)
I'm not sure how much different this is than an office that doesn't upgrade to the newest and greatest Office is though. Before we switched to a Mac/Linux office, we had kept to Windows & Office 95 up to 1999. Occasionaly we sent documents back to suppliers requesting that they send us something we could read because the format was for Office 98, and Office 95 would choke on it.
Re:Depends on the number of seats (Score:2)
we switched to a Mac/Linux office
How did you pull that off? A huge problem with a Mac/Linux office is that there seems to be no Mac/Linux word processor. MS Word works on Windows and Mac. StarOffice works on Windows, Linux and Solaris. But there seems to be nothing that works on Linux and Mac.
Re:Depends on the number of seats (Score:1)
Linux on 150 iMacs. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Linux on 150 iMacs. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Linux on 150 iMacs. (Score:1)
http://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distribution
Why use attachments instead of the file system? (Score:1)
What about the file sharing capabilities of these distros? Or can you use Netware, OpenADS, DCE, or something to avoid the file attachment problem?
It seems like file sharing technologies are more mature than MIME/SMTP file transfers. Most security advisories seem to me to actively discourage all binary attachments. Then you also have the issues of version control, locking, worms, storage space, etc.
Its pretty easy. (Score:2, Informative)
But to be honest, I'd definatly hold off until star office 6.0 (few months) - 5.2 is just way to bloat. Although we use it at work, I dont like it much. Or, if you could get it all working fine, you could go for open office.
For other desktop applicatoins I think that kde offers a very good suite - kmail, konq, etc are all very good imho. (And import outlook email folders)
Cheers
craz
One thing that you might think about (Score:2)
Lots of great comments, but... (Score:1)
Imagine if you will a company that "IN THE COURSE OF THEIR BUSINESS" has to send
From what I've read, SO is not going to be able to do it.
About the closest solution would be a translation service for the docs as they enter/leave the company mail server, but I think this is one of the complexities they were trying to get rid of.
Translating both incoming and outgoing files realtime, without corrupting them... wonder what such a translation service would do when it was fed a macro virus in a Word doc?
Guess I'll hold my breath for OS6, and ask them to do the same, unless there is a better idea?
(I loved the reference to OS5x being half-baked. To listen to some people out there, it's a direct replacement to Office'97, and bug-free to boot. Nice to hear some of the flip-side.)
Re:Lots of great comments, but... (Score:1)
Well, perhaps the exception might be the excell spreadsheets. Some people mail back and forth a huge number of spreadsheets with fairly complecated macros, such that rendering the document as delimited text would loose quite a bit of information.
The best thing to have is a single windows machine which you can access remotely for the purpose of occasionally loading up a received document and saving it out in another more interchangable format. The usual mode of operation would be to read the incoming document with OpenOffice, and only resort to that machine if the result is horribly broken; then you make changes or whatever, but save it out in an open format such as rtf or text, and only send open formats out of the company.
OpenOffice can do the task. Keeping around a few of the windows machines as a backup and use as translators is probably something you need to do regardless of the quality of OpenOffice or whatever other package, as long as the people you communicate with stick with MS.
Check your printers. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Check your printers. (Score:2)
Re:Check your printers. (Score:1)
Surely someone's actually used both... (Score:3, Informative)
Also, SO and MS Office have their own macro environments. SO won't harm MS macros, but it also won't run them. You can, however, get at the macro code and bring it to SO's own VBA clone environment and port the macros reasonably easily. Basically, if you have a lot invested in MS Office macros, switching out will cause some initial pain, and if you rely on running macros sent from outside, life will be rough. This is tru when dealing with any two different office suites.
As for training and usability, SO is picked up very easily by people who have used MS Office. The built-in help isn't nearly as good, and some advanced operations are a bit more tedious, but 90-95% of the time, things are where people expect them to be. And big thick books on it are available from the usual publishers.
SO's mail and calendaring client isn't MAPI-compatible. If an office is running Exchange servers, it's not going to cut it. It is, however a decent IMAP and POP mailer, a good newsreader, and does have good group calendaring of its own. No web interface though as of yet.
Re:Surely someone's actually used both... (Score:1)
However, intricately formatted things (resumes, tightly laid out forms, "word art" drawings, etc.) won't lay out perfectly. Line breaks end up a bit different, graphic placement on presentation slides is sometimes a bit off, and so forth.
Hmmm, just like when you open such a document on pretty much any Windows/Office machine other than the one it was created on. (Usually because of different printer drivers, or different versions of the printer driver.Or perhaps because Word felt like screwing with the document today. It's hard to tell.)
A Couple of Points (Score:1)
We investiaged alternative to MS Office some time ago, and there are some issues:
-While most free software can open Word Docs with considerable accuracy, the problem becomes embedded OLE objects. Now, Word Docs are written in a bidirectional COM stream (similar in ways to Mac Data Fork/Resource Fork). If you open an XP Document on Office 97, what you get is an RTF-like rendering of the source. No OLE, no red lining (for example), but the text and it's formatting. Same thing with Star Office and MS Office - open an MS Office document under Star and you get an RTF rendering of the source. I have not tried this with Star Office 6, but I did extensive testing with 5.x. Our solution to the OLE problem (since it does creep up on Macs with MS Office as well) was to render each and every incoming Word Document as a PDF via a robot (print to file --> make a postscript --> distill). We have a 99%+ success rate with this.
-One thing you should understand about understand that PDF's are largely untouchable. You either need to open it in Acrobat Exchange to make changes or use another tool (we bought Solvero and Asura which were $40,000 for one copy - excellent tools but expensive).
-Star Office 6 supports XML as the file format. We think this is great because it makes writing import filters for layout software a snap. We're just waiting for it to mature a little before we dive in (we figure Q2 2002 before we take a serious look).
Now, those are the technical issues, which are the easy ones. The hard issue is going to be selling your users on a change to a free office product. A lot of it will depend on how many users you have, what their role is (if they're just saving documents for internal use vs. documents they need to send out to the public vs. documents they need to share with 100 different agencies who've all standardized on Office), what features of MS Office they use, and how much your company is willing to spend. The cost savings alone could make it an easier sell. If they won't take the jump to something free, suggest Word Perfect Office (which is compatible, slick, supported, and not free).
Email me if you wish to discuss this further. Best of luck!
The reaction of management is the main concern. (Score:1, Insightful)
Start small and slow (Score:3, Informative)
I'm fairly certian that there is a SO version for windows. So install that now on all the machines and suggest that people use it. When you buy a new machine for someone who doesn't do heavy duty office work don't buy office for it, just put SO on. See what the users reaction is, if most complain then you know this isn't working, but you haven't lost much.
Don't forget training. Don't even think you can make this switch without giving users trainging. But then you can't make the switch to XP without training either, just a little less.
The unix way takes some getting used to, but I find it grows on you. Don't sell this as a windows replacement though, sell it as the new way.
Keep the latest version of wine around, it is good enough for some purposes and will help ease the transisition.