2-Year OpenOffice High School Case Study 472
Michael writes "NewsForge (a Slashdot sister site) is carrying a 2-year OpenOffice case-study on a Detroit high school who switched from Windows NT and MS Office 97 to Linux and OpenOffice. The results? Better than expected. In 2003, the school, who saved over $100,000 in the process, converted 110 Windows NT machines to Linux with OpenOffice. After several surprising developments, including OpenOffice's ability to open old Word documents that even the new Word versions were having troubles with, the school now uses it almost exclusively, has classes on it's use, and encourages students to use it whenever possible. From the article: 'While OpenOffice.org is now used by 100% of the faculty and students in the school (though some administrative staff still uses Microsoft Office due to specific software requirements), students are not required to use OpenOffice.org when working at home. However, a presentation is given to students at the start of every school year to advise them on the use of OpenOffice.org, the availability of free copies, and potential problems of converting from Microsoft Office formats.'"
Open source does win out in the end (Score:3, Insightful)
This one is priceless... (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFS:
This sums it up so well...
Actually, has anyone out there run into any issues with OpenOffice as a substitute for M$ Office? I'm considering switching everything over, especially after reading this article.
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open Office Study (Score:5, Insightful)
OO is all very well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Did the school donate any money to OO? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Open Office Study (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is great because (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Did the school donate any money to OO? (Score:2, Insightful)
I resent that comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Did the school donate any money to OO? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Excellent to see... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, that's true. However, if someone in charge decides they can save 100,000$ in software, and put that money into books or teacher salaries (or an additional hire) instead, then this is a net benefit to the school without their funding being reduced.
They need to start using XP and Office, and run up their support bills.
It bothers me that you're advocating a publicly-funding institute wasting money. And we wonder why our governments mis-manage funds? It's in large part due to that kind of thinking. No, I would rather that the school not waste money, and that the savings go into other school programs, or even into other schools, or even into other sectors of the government that need funding (of which there are many).
If I was the schools administrator I'd avoid anything with the word "free" in it like the plague.
I truly hope most school administrators are not like you. Avoiding things that are "free" because that might reduce your budget for next year? What's the point of having a big budget if you're forced to waste it? I would much prefer that those in charge of spending my tax dollars do the right thing and spend my money intelligently.
Re:But how much does the training cost? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Open Office Study (Score:2, Insightful)
According to the wording in the article, it seems more likely that they had applications built on Access or the like. I've had to install MS Office on quite a few clients' computers because they had specialized applications dependent upon it.
It was the *staff* that converted. (Score:5, Insightful)
It was the staff who converted -- and (to their surprise) found that it was way better than they expected. Learning curve for the staff is quite relevant, since they all probably knew MS Office before hand.
On the other hand, you still have a learning curve for every new version of MS Office too... Probably about as much as the difference between MS and Open..
and kept MS Office for some of the administration stuff, probably because they couldn't afford not openning certain documents.
MS Office couldn't open some MS office documents, and OO couldn't open some MS Office documents -- so overall, I'd say we're about equal here.
Re:These students will suffer from the M$ tax (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know a single person I'd call technically competent who is only able to use one word processor, spreadsheet, IDE, CAD tool, whatever to the exclusion of all others. The tech curve is not static, and knowing one thing (even if it is the most popular) is to handicap yourself when that curve moves beyond what you know.
MS Tax or no, I consider this to be doing the students a favor.
Re:Open source does win out in the end (Score:2, Insightful)
When GNU, X11, and other open source projects started making available open source alternatives, people replaced their proprietary tools with open source ones because the open source ones worked better. The Linux kernel was the last missing piece, and when that fell into place, UNIX installations started moving entirely to open source systems.
It's analogous with Microsoft and consumer apps. OpenOffice is not just a "free" system, it is also ultimately better.
(It's ironic that Sun is trying to portray their shitty Solaris software as something high quality--if it weren't for GNU, X11, and other open source software, Sun would have been bankrupt before the dotCom revolution even started. This way, they are simply going out of business a decade later, but they still don't know how to write software.)
Re:Bullshit. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is going to be a typical scene of geek masturbation, with a single common theme in mind: It worked for me, therefore it must be perfect for everyone in the world
Wow how is that precognition going? This thread is already several hundred posts long and I haven't seen anyone (aside from you) voice that assertion. This is a typical straw man argument, ...weak.
This bears repeating... (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the best quotes I've ever seen on the whole OpenOffice.org vs. Microsoft Office debate:
Re:Open Office Study (Score:3, Insightful)
I know you meant this is the sense that a major group of users supported it, but it also works in the sense that they were actually able to give instruction for its use.
One of the reasons F/OSS has such an uphill battle is because existing software has such huge support in terms of classes on it's use, informal help on its use, and the availability of certifications. The reason this project worked for this school was because they actaully taught classes on how to use OOo and there was also plenty of informal help, both from teachers and other students.
This is one of the few comparisons I've seen of the two platforms that actually comes close to being "apples to apples." Many people who give MS Office the edge are actually counting in this status quo educational edge, either consiously or subconsiously. On the other hand, many proponents of OOo either consiously or subconsiously give it an edge simply because it's open source rather than because it's actually superior. These guys gave classes on it's use and noted at least two areas where OOo was superior, cost and backward compatibility. That's a very good thing for this product.
TW
Re:Open source does win out in the end (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, this and all other TCO "studies" are BS. They "saved" $100,000 over a completely different solution, not a better one. By this, they kept around their old PCs and threw Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP [ltsp.org]), and said that was much cheaper than buying new PCs with XP licenses on them. I'm not too familiar with any MS products, but I've heard of Citrix [citrix.com] which is similar technology I believe. Granted Citrix is not free, but it should work with their old equipment as well.
However, I will say that I'm impressed that OpenOffice works that well. I haven't used it in a while since my hd crashed, and I have had no need to reinstall it, but I thought it was painful to use (this was maybe a year ago).
Also, I don't believe that proprietary UNIX apps were replaced with GNU stuff until the late 90s. GNU started out to be a free OS to replace UNIX, but it has yet to of happened, but Linux did. Before Linux took off and became a viable server OS, GNU just had a compiler, and various standard UNIX tools, but those were just installed on a UNIX box, not a replacement. Thank GOD Solaris now ships with at least gzip and bash and other GNU utils, that was a pain without those. The compiler was excellent because it was able to at least compile other GNU stuff. Compilers were not very portable back then, and having one that worked on all platforms greatly accelerated the GNU progress.
This is a landmark case because Linux was installed on a number of machines and used for 2 years in an office environment. I would be a little frustrated by using it personally, but if it worked for them, especially with the backwards compatibility with office docs, thats pretty impressive.
Re:This one is priceless... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really. PDF export is THE major feature that OOo has over MS Office. The only extra feature that's comprehensible to a casual user, anway.
Re:This one is priceless... (Score:2, Insightful)
If they were real power users, they would have used a database where you can enforce data rules and have a much better chance of having a clean application.
It's really better for everyone to leave these power spreadsheets behind and do it properly.
Re:Tried downloading Open Office just now ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now consider OpenOffice adopting your strategy using a blue-W icon. Or Mozilla using a blue-E icon. How will will that wash with Microsoft's lawyers?
Just switch already (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the time I'm sending them PDF's by posting them on the web server, which is as easy as saving them to a network folder, which I do right from OO. And I really like being able to use the same application on Windows or Linux.
I've also known some small offices that have switched over, very few problems. All those FUD talking points MSFT uses are absolute crap. There is no massive learning curve or training costs and anyone who can open a PDF can read what you create.
A $100,000 to a school district is a lot of money. That could pay for an after school program for a whole year, equipment for a sports program, an extra teacher. Even if OO was a vastly inferior product, which it's not IMHO, it would seem like the things you could do with the money in a school far outweigh having the latest and greatest software.
Re:Open Office Study (Score:3, Insightful)
hahaha
Re:Tried downloading Open Office just now ... (Score:1, Insightful)
The file I download should have been as small an EXE as possible -- perhaps a small simple app that downloads the big file for you in a friendly way.
That sounds more like a personal preference, and actually a bad idea with dumb users who might be running software firewalls. First, if they download a small file, they believe that's all there is and get confused when it starts downloading more and more. Worse, if the setup.exe tries to download more, the software firewall will alert the user that SETUP.EXE (or some other confusing program) is trying to access the internet, that creates uncessary stress for the user. And probably the dumb user has been instructed to "deny" access to all unrecognized programs, so they get stuck. It's best to let the DUMB user do one thing at a time: 1. download, 2. install, 3. try it out, 4. setup preferences. At best, your small download thing should be offered as a "power user" option.
A "Blue W " icon needs to represent the Word Processor, a "Green X" icon for the Spreadsheet.
WTF??? Why "Blue"? Why "W"? Which dumb user knows about a "Word Processor"?? Dumb user wants to write things, not process words. WTF is a Word Processor??
Dude, you're making recommendations based solely on your own preference and your influence from Microsoft Office. That's bad. Really bad. Sorry but you need badly to brush up on your usability.