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Open Office in the Office

  • 18-01-2009 3:16pm
    #1
    Alzar
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 314 ✭✭


    Hello all,

    Macros42 pointed me in the direction of this board.
    Here's a question I asked on a thread in the Computers & Tech board & Macros42 said I may get a better response here, so if you have any advice or experience of migrating from MS to OO, I'd appreciate it.

    Folks,

    I'm working on the IT Team in our company.
    Are any of you running OO at work, say 400/500 seats? Whats the feedback from your users? We are currently looking at OO -vs- O2k7.

    Would you like your business to migrate to Open Office or have you deployed Open Office already? If so, are there many support issue's with it?

    Can it be managed centrally, i.e are there adm files for it or is it all ini based?
    How did you install it across your estate? Login script? Zenworks/SMS/SCCM? Deskside visit, perhaps?

    Basically all the IT Team are M$oft trained, myself included. I haven't looked at Open Source OS'es or apps since '98 or '99.
    Do you think this could cause us problems?

    Last question, did your users have many problems with using OO?

    Thanks.
    Al.
    Sorry for all the questions.


Comments

  • #2
    Feelgood
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 2,191 ✭✭✭Feelgood


    I would do a lot of research on this first to be honest, though in many users eyes OO is a lot better than Microsoft and obviously its free aswell saving on user licenses in your IT Budget.

    There are a lot of offices that I know of that have deployed OO to a user base even bigger that 4-500 seats so that wouldn't really be an issue to be honest but it really depends on what type of company you are deploying it in.

    The biggest issue you are going to get is user training and that alone is going to be huge for you especially for 4-500 people. Everyone will tout that OO Calc is very like Excel and that OO Writer is like Word though at the end of the day there are different animals, they have different menus, user interfaces and different functionality which would definitely require some sort of user training.

    Now depending on your company and how you use office it could be a nightmare for you, if your in finance and say have an actuary department you will find that departments like these have very specific spreadsheets, with very specific macros or scripts running. So in areas like this you would have to get them to test their spreadsheets with OO, again a lengthy process. You see where I am coming from?.

    You can push out OO through Zen no probs in exactly the same way that you would MS Office, I wouldn't be too worried about the install its fairly straight forward.

    Open source has come an awful long way in 10 years and it should be embraced, its nice to see an IT department thinking about it and I doubt you will have many problems picking up its functionality.

    Again though I think you need to research this a lot more before making a comitment. Possible do a feeler with it, take a user from each department and deploy it to them for a while and see how they get on with it first. See what kind of problems/queries they come back with and assess it that way
    but definitely dont dive into a head first commitment with it...

    Hope this helps..


  • #3
    TechieEddy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 185 ✭✭TechieEddy


    Hi.
    Theres a good thread going on about this over at Slashdot
    Of the main issues seems to be Open Office impress. Not great tbh.
    This site was recommeded to help with cross compatibility issues.
    Also a new version out soon discussed here
    Lots of research, testing and training to be done if your going to take it on.
    All the best with it.


  • #4
    stapolinhosting
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 350 ✭✭stapolinhosting


    I use Open Office quite a bit at home, but I do put it to hard work.

    I find it has alot more to offer than MS Office and has some very good features that MS dont have.

    Even something as simple as saving a file.. You get tons more formats to save as than MS would ever dream of giving you.

    The Power Point equiv in OO is excelent! Must better than MS anyday.

    OO has a very similar look and feel to it as MS and is very easy to learn because of this.

    I still use MS Office for little things like Tab Del CSV files, simply because i'm used to useing it. But I have ventured to OO a few times to do csv files and have had no problems at all.

    It's really a matter of opinion, you will either like it or you wont.

    The main plus I give OO is i have not come across as many bugs as I do with MS. Then again, MS launch software well before the fix all the bugs... Hence the little window that apears every times an MS program crashes... Send Report? Only reason for this is cause MS didnt fix the bugs in the first place and want its users to find them, the more reports they get the higher up the priority list the bugs go.


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