NZ Outfit Dumps Open Office For MS Office 581
(Score.5, Interestin writes "The NZ Automobile Association has just announced that it is dropping Open Office and switching back to MS Office. According to their CIO, 'Microsoft Office is not any cheaper, but it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing because of issues such as incompatibility and training.' In addition, 'you have no idea where open-source products are going, whereas vendors like Microsoft provide a roadmap for the future.'" About 500 seats are involved. MS conceded to letting Office users run the software at home as well.
wait wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, I don't see what the big deal is. Perhaps the folks that make OO.o can learn something from this and give potential customers some kind of assurance that their product will still be around/supported/updated for the foreseeable future.
IT team can't handle metrics? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare.
Isn't obvious where MS is going though? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where it 's heading (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do I think the exact opposite? I have more faith in ODF being supported by multiple apps, say, twenty years from now.
roadmap?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:wait wait (Score:3, Insightful)
What exactly were they expecting??? (Score:2, Insightful)
MS Roadmap (Score:2, Insightful)
2. The next version is going to be much more colorful, but will need 4x the memory and CPU power. We're also planning to make a 3D graphics card mandatory.
3. Just when you got comfortable with the present version, we'll stop supporting it. We'd also deactivate it over the internet if we could get away with it.
Just becasue it's free... (Score:5, Insightful)
My employer pays something like $40/hr (I think..I'm salary). So if I spent even 10 hours getting as good with Gimp as I already am with Photoshop, then the closed-source product is cheaper. But I do use all open source at home when time is less important than money.
no idea where open-source products are going... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:wait wait (Score:5, Insightful)
They have a few valid points but they are hard to work around.
1. OpenOffice will never be as compatible with Office as Office is.
2. If you know Office you must learn OpenOffice. Office is taught in every school I know of.
3. I still don't think Calc is even as good as Excel in Office 2000 but then I haven't really used it a lot in a long time.
4. Outlooks+Exchange are a better Enterprise calendering system than anything I have seen from FOSS.
5. Sharepoint. I haven't seen anything as easy to use from the FOSS community.
Microsoft had done some good things, give the devil his due.
Re:IT team can't handle metrics? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like there's a disconnect between the IT staff and the business side of the house. Any CIO worth their salt would have had before-and-after metrics to compare.
If it was almost impossible to work out the cost, it can't be a problem with the software, but with their metrics.
And it isn't a real reason to change their packages. The issue is orthogonal to the products used.
Just because msoffice has a licensing cost, (OO does, too, zero), it doesn't mean the other costs are more easily accounted for.
Of course, in any office package change, there should be more money devoted to support, but with OO it could be easier due to licensing costs saved.
I think they probably didn't buy support from the beginning, and thought that OO had free (as in beer) support. That is not true, of course. And probably that is why they can't measure the costs.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because TFA specifically said that MS "conceded" to letting their users run office at home.
I'm not saying the points for switching back to MSO aren't potentially valid but this story reminds me of a lot of recent trends. Companies/governments only have to mention the word "Linux" or "Open Source" around MS these days and suddenly they are falling over backward to give a better deal, concede on a license issue and in general make people feel like their getting a better deal then the rest of the world. It's a great new procurement strategy:
1. "Evaluate" open source for next upgrade cycle
2. Negotiate with MS for lower license fees
3. Cite training/hidden costs as reason for giving up on Open Source
Again, not saying that some reasons for sticking with MS aren't valid but some of this is just plain gaming the system.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think MSO and OO.o are "just word processors", just stick with Wordpad. It came with Windows.
Re:Linux? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:no roadmap? (Score:3, Insightful)
Different/Better/Worse? (Score:2, Insightful)
Open Office isn't as good because it doesn't do [something] the way MS Office does it
or
OO isn't as good because it won't render MS Office stuff properly.
Now, I have no real preference for either (I have both on my Machine, since the other half needs MS Office to be compatible with a course she's doing, and I had OO originally cause it was free...)
But why are these things that make *Open Office* 'worse'?
Why are there never winges about 'MS Office just doesn't render Open Office format docs properly' or 'MS is rubbish because the tab key behaves differently to OO'?
A lot of people, including AANZ, seem to be confusing familiarity with quality, when it ain't necessarily so...
Re:I mentioned this last time... (Score:1, Insightful)
Brilliant! (Score:3, Insightful)
*They weren't sure if it was cheaper or not, so they bought MS Office (again), which guarantees that OOo was cheaper.
*MS told them some stories about future plans that MS may or may not do with MS Office, and OOo didn't.
*Someone wanted to use Word and Sharepoint as a CMS for their website.
*They didn't actually switch 100% to OOo, so there were occasional internal compatibility issues between OOo users and MS Office users. It would also seem that some employees were sending ODF docs to the outside world, and people didn't know what they were.
So, basically, this organization switched back to MS Office because of some formatting issues with MS' undocumented file formats, some features that aren't actually available yet in MS Office looked interesting, and improper use of OOo by employees.
I've heard a lot of reasons to use MS Office instead of OOo, but this looks to be a pretty sorry collection of excuses. So far, the only two that come up in my line of work are lack of training, and poor VBA support. There isn't really any way around the VBA problems at the moment, either.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in other words, you've never worked inside a modern corporate office.
Users use of the suite of applications that come in Microsoft Office to do complex things, from presentations, to databases, to collaboration, to complex spreadsheets, etc etc. There's a *lot* of functionality present in OO or MS Office and it's not all trivial to use.
Honestly, Both of Them Kind of Suck (Score:3, Insightful)
Important data tends to be stored in other systems anyway. You probably have a financial system where stuff like payroll data gets stored. I'm seeing more use of wikis for shared documents and that sucks a lot less than passing a word document around like a bong. The MS Office calendar and sending meeting invites is perhaps its strongest capability but even that isn't anything that a company like Google couldn't duplicate easily enough. Perhaps they'd find they'd get more work done if they jettisoned both MS Office AND Open Office and rolled some of their own well integrated tools if there were any gaps left (I doubt there would be, though.)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
How is MS offering a discount/incentive/license concession any different? Some MS sales rep had a potential sale of 500 seats, and had to sweeten the deal to get a sale. Purchasing people are always pushing for a better deal, and threatening to take their business elsewhere if they don't get it.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
But yes, I do agree; a word processor is a word processor. A spreadsheet is a spreadsheet; if you cannot cope with Open Office instead of MS Word, I wonder if you really understood what you were doing in the first place (in either program!).
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:5, Insightful)
He could... if WordPad, err, wasn't so incompatible with reading default MS Office - generated .doc files...
Re:wait wait (Score:3, Insightful)
Office, Outlook, and Exchange are big reasons to not use Linux. That and frankly VisualBasic are really deal killers for a lot of places as far as Linux on the desktop.
Sharepoint and Exchange are great weapons to use to get Linux off servers.
It is a problem for Linux in that if All of your software will run on Linux there is no reason to keep Windows If you have to keep Windows then you have to keep Windows.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are ample help files in Open Office and the system works quite well. I search the words I seek, find the "how to" on any given topic and go with it. I cannot imagine what aspects of OpenOffice might need "training."
(To be fair, though, Powerpoint is a lot more powerful than the Open Office presentation stuff... I tried to get it to do some things I and was unsuccessful with it.)
And while it may be something of a requisite to already know how to use MS Office stuff prior to employment, I'd have to say that such a requisite rather stacks the deck in favor of MS Office wouldn't you say? But even so, for someone to be unable to transport their knowledge and skills with Office to a similar package is a pretty good sign of low IQ.
But the more I think about "compatibility" the more I think they may be talking about macros and visual basic. Frankly, I'd rather see VBA done away with entirely whether or not MS Office is used in an office environment. If some sort of automated tool or other thing is needed, let that be created as a separate work that can be UNINSTALLED. Integrating application code into an office suite is begging for trouble and it does quite often... I hate the integration of software packages like word and application "X" or worse, application "X" being written in VBA. As a previous administrator for Goldmine in a hyper-extended environment, I know what ridiculous problems arise from such systems and what a pain in the ass it can be.
But I can appreciate the bigger picture as well: If employee group A can operate more efficiently under MSOffice than they can under OpenOffice, then until the cause for that problem can be resolved, it would make sense to go to MSOffice. But the reasons and the cause have everything to do with it and if the reason is "because my people are stupid and can't figure out OpenOffice" then I think there is a temporary solution (let them use MSOffice) and there's the long-term solution (hire smarter people) -- there will be benefits well beyond that of saving a few bucks on an office suite. Because I've got to state the obvious here: If they are too stupid to figure out OpenOffice, then I must assume their stupidity is more than likely to extend beyond the ability to use office applications effectively.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
Banging together a quick presentation is pretty easy to port from Powerpoint to Impress or vice versa. However, complex presentations may not be. There's a *lot* of functionality in, say, Powerpoint that isn't going to be easy for most people to transfer directly into Impress with zero training.
The same goes for Writer, Calc, Base, etc. Expecting to simply drop users who do a lot of in-depth work with these applications directly into OO without training is a recipe for disaster, and no sane IT department would ever ever do it.
Re:You mean MS Office is generally better than OO? (Score:4, Insightful)
As for OpenOffice's compatibility with Office, it really comes into its own when Office is incapable of opening an Office file. It does happen. And in that case, OpenOffice will frequently be able to come to the rescue.
I'm sure it's much more preferable to be on the office treadmill, where you're eventually forced to upgrade by being sent files from the newer version.
I find it amusing how there is this attitude that OpenOffice sucks because it can't always perfectly handle a closed proprietary format, but how the situation that people are being locked into that format is somehow perfectly acceptable. Despite all its flaws. I can't help but stifle a laugh when I hear about the perfection of MS Office. The suite has so many problems, I truly do not know where to begin. It's merely entrenched, highly overrated and as buggy as hell.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
Every high school within seventy-five miles, every community college, every outreach program for those on disability and welfare, offers evening courses in MS Office. These certificates are marketable, they are what employers want to see.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:1, Insightful)
I now have three clients using Office 2007 (for a total of about 30 people). No training was required except for a small presentation, and everyone loved this new version. It was to a point where people were "playing" with Office 2007 during their lunch break, instead of Freecell or Spider. I'm not sure where you got this idea of a "major learning curve", but from my own experience, that's simply not true. The interface of Office 2007 is really that good.
I use OpenOffice myself for political reasons. I install it on all my clients computers. I also train at least one person on site to make sure someone can handle publishing OpenOffice document. But the fact is I don't propose to switch to OpenOffice anymore. From my own experience, it's a major change without any real advantage and lots of inconvenience. In the end, it's simply not worth it. On the other hand, switching to Office 2007 is a minor change, and one that improve productivity.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's easy to bang together a quick PowerPoint presentation if you want to put some slides up for a presentation you are doing to your class. It's easy to bang together a presentation if all of the data that you need is stored in a single location, or in a single spreadsheet. On the other hand if you need to draw together data from multiple business units spread across the globe that are stored on servers spread across the globe, you might want some collaboration tools. You might want something like SharePortal and Office 2007. Your board of directors might expect to see things like trend data, and market capitalization, and ROI, and all sorts of other information that people often store in Excel, or Access or SQL, or Oracle, or whatever. You might a tool like Excel that can pull data from multiple data sources and correlate it before you dump it into something like PowerPoint to display it.
You are right when you think that the individual, specific tasks in and of themselves may not be all that complex. However tying all of those tasks together in an enterprise environment is a completely different story.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
You realize you can generate dynamic documents with Word that interact with databases and interfaces pretty easily, correct?
You know, like writing a base invoice in Word, linking it to Access or SQL server to pull down charges, and using the Excel engine to generate a graph of productivity provided?
Even if OO does the same stuff, it takes significant time to learn a new library, or even more likely, a whole different language.
But since you just want a word processor... WordPad is a free word processor. And it's just that, a word processor.
Re:wait wait (Score:3, Insightful)
It all depends on how much clout you have with them. I work at a college, and between our employees computers, our students computers, and the many hundreds of lab computers around campuses, the multi-year contract for our site is worth millions. With money like that on the line, it's pretty easy to get them to concede enough offsite licenses to cover the few hundred employees actually willing to use them.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:4, Insightful)
> as rocks. And I'm not writing flame-bait here. I dead serious about that.
By writing that you make it clear that you have never had to deal with 'normals'. Wish I worked where you work, but I don't live on a planet where everyone is computer literate[1], capable of independent learning and posseses above average intelligence and reasoning abilities. Thankfully we never allowed Microsoft in the front door though so we manage to get along with OO.o/FF/etc running on networked Linux workstations. We didn't have to deal with the whinging due an inability to deal with change but do training? What fantasy world are you living in. It can take sometimes take a week to get a new hire to learn that logging in with CAPS LOCK on won't work.
[1] I define 'computer literate' much the same way as I define 'literacy'. Literacy in the sense of the English Language means one able to read the language, speak it, reason in it and express thoughts in writing using it. Computer literacy means the ability to read and write PROGRAMS, even simple ones, understand the ideas underlying common applications i.e. understand what cut/paste DOES, not memorizing the keystroke. Know the IDEA behind a spreadsheet. Knowing every function isn't required, knowing enough to figure out the help system IS.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
My company hires a lot of people who have little to no prior experience using computers, let alone extensive experience in Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice Writer or anything else. Which means that not only do we have to bring them up to speed on the tools that they'll need to work here, but also on the forms, macros and other things that are specific to how they will be doing it.
It's much more cost effective for us to schedule a short class for everyone than have the people who don't know what they're doing flailing around for the first couple of days trying to figure out how to use things. Sure, it annoys the people who have used the software before, but at the very least we know that all of our people have a common starting point.
Re:Sharepoint (Score:1, Insightful)
Some folks want a working system, not a box of parts.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
Having used those tools... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing more to say after this: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wait wait (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sharepoint (Score:2, Insightful)
K-l-u-d-g-e.
Re:You mean MS Office is generally better than OO? (Score:3, Insightful)
You see compatibility from a technical point of view, where OpenOffice surely does a better job opening Office documents than Office does opening OpenOffice documents.
People who use Office as a tool for business see compatibility from a social point of view. Office can open 99.99% of documents that are sent to them. Open Office can only open 90%. And that's really the end of the story.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not quite. They are still whining about the 'change' to StarOffice from what they are used to elsewhere (be it at home, a former job, or whatever...).
If you put these same people on a Mac with Microsoft Office, how many of them do you think would still complain?
But saddest of all, is if you put a lot of these people onto the Office Suite they are whining for most of the whining STILL won't stop. Even the latest versions of Office still continually mangle formatting and do annoying things with indentation, autocorrect, borders, object anchors, etc when you try an edit non-trivial documents.
When you've got staroffice, though, people blame it on staroffice and say "gee this wouldn't be an issue if I had Microsoft Office", but if you actually give them MS Office, these people still have the same sort of problems, except they just blame it on their 'computer', or the person who wrote the document if it wasn't them.
Your apparent perception that there's no significant difference in quality between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice/StarOffice is somewhere between wishful thinking and delusion.
There are significant differences, but I'm not sure 'quality' is the right benchmark. MS Office IS generally somewhat better at working with its own document formats most of the time, and it boasts a lot of advanced enterprise features that very very very few enterprises use, and almost no small business / department ever touches.
...and the OO Roadmap (Score:2, Insightful)
2. The next version might emulate half of the look and feel that MS office had 5 years ago. Poorly. Oh, is that memory? I'll just take that.
3. If it takes you more than 5 years to get comforatble with a product, this is the one for you. We'll never change a thing. And we'll keep up the same level of support forever! (See item #1.)
4. And a bonus... it's Open! So the other two OO users can read your documents too! For "Free"!
Re:You mean MS Office is generally better than OO? (Score:2, Insightful)
Office can open 99.99% of documents that are sent to them. O,/p>
You've obviously never had to explain to a PHB why the document he spent hours working on during the weekend at home can't open in the office computer. And when you do deliver it (opened in OOo) it looks totally unlike anything he dreamed of, when he was working withit at home.
MSO (any version) is utterly incompatible with MSO (same version) on any computer other than the one it was created on. On the computer it was created on, there is a 50% or greater chance that it will be incompatible with the system the next time it is opened.
Amber
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Insightful)
I do *NOT* consider myself to be anything "above average" in any capacity
I'm going to have to beg to differ. A clearly written post with four-syllable words, no spelling errors, complete sentences, and (except for unusual use of ellipses) excellent punctuation, make it clear that you are above average for Slashdot at least. Although it's not always evident from the postings here, that means you are way above the general average.
It's not politically correct to say so, but half of the population suffers below-average intelligence. How desperate that condition is is demonstrated by the number of above-average people whose first reaction is to reject that statement. They aren't particularly stupid. It's just that you are particularly smart but haven't been put in a position to really comprehend the vast gulf between a 130 and a 100 IQ.
I've been involved with word processors since they were called memory typewriters and 'text processors' before that. I trained and designed training on a lot of products. What I found is that, independent of the product, the typical non-technical office worker (above-average intelligence required) needs five days of training to be able to produce and edit non-trivial documents. If they don't get it in a controlled environment, they will pick it up the hard way (reading help, consulting "power users") and use more of their time and that of others than you could possibly save by skipping or shortening the training. They will also tend to produce documents that are a pain to edit.
Seconded. Furthermore... (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless of intelligence, when people learn how to use a tool in an adhoc manner (or even if they have training) they will fall into a habitual usage pattern, their comfort zone. They may not even be aware of features to solve problems they use inefficient methods for (page numbering, etc.) and will not even consider looking in the help documentation since they don't expect the feature, or don't know what it's called.
Tools like Office, Photoshop, and the like will always be like this. And switching the tool on people (even if it's functionally equivalent) takes the user out of the comfort zone and as their productivity suffers, they lament the change.
It would be helpful if those classes in HS/College that teach you "Business Skills" or "Typing" didn't just teach a software application, but actually taught you about the tools and approaches in general so that the end-user had a good feel for what tasks can be automated/assisted by commonly available software.
Re:Nothing more to say after this: (Score:3, Insightful)
SharePoint is primarily for intranets and extranets, where the content consists mostly of Word/Excel/PowerPoint files. Using Word to edit this "website" is precisely what you're supposed to do with it.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not anything like as entrenched as Exchange, but dont discount it too much. There's a lot of activity going on around sharepoint.
And to discount access? Access is so ridiculously successful at giving non-IT folks the ability to create simple database and form apps without involving IT, that its often the bane of many IT shops in large organizations.
Many, many organizations out there have lots of sub-enterprise (but still critical) business processes that run purely on access, and were developed as point solution by the dept 'techy' because IT didnt have the resources to do the project properly.