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.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I mentioned this last time... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen a few power point presentations. They were all overblown, and everyone except the sales guys ignored them. Excel was used to make tables. No spreadsheet features used, just as a way to line things up in rows. Other than that, its all using word to write documents. Notepad would fill the same need if it allowed you to insert pictures.
So what? (Score:0, Interesting)
There's a lot to be learned form their reasons to abandon Open Office, but nah, lets just call them names and plug our ears.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
* Nearly all female users will refuse to switch and complain at every little difference. At a school, we decided that the school would provide OpenOffice.org on all teacher computers, if the teacher wanted to use MS Office they would have to come up with the funds somewhere else beside the Technology related budgets. All of the Male teachers (except 1) happily switched to OOo. All of the Female teachers (except the handful that had no experience with MS Office) chose to purchase MS Office on their own.
* Most people use a word processor by typing something in, highlighting text and changing fonts, spacing, etc. A well instructed lesson in Styles will lessen the impact people have when switching to OOo. It will probably increase productivity once they learn to use styles instead of micro-managing their documents.
* If you are seriously planning a deployment, test out users on a Linux Distribution. In my experience OOo works much better (and much faster) within Linux than it does in Windows. Also, I have (surprisingly) found that many people find Linux easier to use than Windows (using Novell's SLED 10).
* Show your users how to use the Help Documentation. It actually works with OOo.
If you are considering a switch, do not be too high strung. People will complain, but that is human nature. Also be sure to keep at least a few workstations that run MS Office, not for compatibility issues, but to have the user's show you how they do something within MS Office that they cannot figure out in OpenOffice.org (Most people think they are experts in Word, but usually aren't and this will weed out the idiotic problems).
Roadmap? the Japanese had a roadmap... (Score:3, Interesting)
Window 95 - the last Consumer OS before merging with NT.
Windows 95 OSR2, ditto.
Windows 98, ditto.
Windows 98 SE, ditto.
Windows ME, yeppers.
Thanks for the precision and accuracy! And for the extra dimensions in the test cases.
Sure, MS provides you a roadmap, but it's for a different city! Even they don't know where the fsck they are going. I was testing a BackOffice product back in the day. They gutted the feature set to get it out the door ahead of the immanent release of NT 5, and only beat it by 18 months.
Forced upgrades through strategic backward incompatibility, useless duplicate licenses because nobody can track the ones that come with OEM pcs. Oh yeah, give it to me.
What a tool.
Re:Sharepoint (Score:4, Interesting)
Customizable, expandable, and portable. It can even easily be made rather secure. I've installed this combo many times and not a single dissatisfied customer.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:2, Interesting)
My question to you is then: how can you say that OpenOffice.org is maintained by amateurs and hobbyists?
In fact, I disagree with your entire premise. Who is more likely to do a good job--someone who is doing what they do because they *enjoy* doing it (amateurs and hobbyists) or somebody that is trying to get by at work without getting fired so that they get the paycheck and can maintain their Red Bull addiction?
.DOCX. XLSX, and PPTX files (Score:3, Interesting)
My observation is this is an insanely major hurdle for OpenOffice. And even a major factor for people switching from earlier versions of MS-Office.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Interesting)
Feel free to contact the magazine's editor [fairfaxbm.co.nz] so they can fill in this gap in the article (specifically, in the third paragraph).
Modern office and training (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you??
I have worked in multiple corporations, a school district, and a government agency.
None of them train their staff in an effective way. The users are on their own.
Some will pay lip service, and pretend to train staff, but less than 5% are allowed to actually go to training.
All of the business took 2-3 years to upgrade to a current version of MS Office, causing many problems with file compatibilites, since Microsoft changes the file format of every version of Office.
As far as capabilities, some people will use MS Office well, but it's a small percentage. Most people in the places I have worked over the last 20 years, barely know how to use MS Office, and it's a huge waste of time and money for simple documents.
So when you state that users use the office suite to do complex things, just how many people is that? In my experience, it has never been higher than 5% of all staff who have MS Office.
Re:Sniff, sniff... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, really? Do go on about those back-end collaboration tools and the ten people in the world that use them. Unless you strictly mean Exchange, there's only a handful of people that even know what Sharepoint or any of the other even more obscure Backoffice components do. In my experience Microsoft Office primarily consists of Word and either Excel or PowerPoint (or both) for most people, with Access, FrontPage and Publisher barely registering on anyone's radar. All I can say about OO is that the spreadsheet and presentation components are not as strong or user friendly as the MS Office parts, but the word processor is definitely up there.