While the cost of switching will depend on how your organization values time, you're going to continue paying in small ways as long as you use OpenOffice. In the situation you describe, I'd stick with MS Office. If your user base is flexible and your support system is ready to handle it (think Higher Ed), OpenOffice is probably a viable alternative. Extra administration, transitionary training, dealing with users upset over losing features (through ignorance or technical disparity), extra hassle in exchanging documents, extra support cost incurred by using a non industry standard, etc. There's also a lot of little things in MS Office that has made it the definitive Office Suite, like Word's fantastic templating/styling system and the slick Document Map and Outline views.Īssuming OpenOffice's feature set meets your needs, it comes down to price. Most of your users won't change this, so bring on the confusion!
Excel gurus will blow up your car for making them use Calc (ditto for Access/Base).Cross-platform (doesn't matter for your intranet, but possibly interaction outside?).Opens/saves as pretty much any file format out there.I assume this is why you're looking at it in the first place. Since these are integral parts of your environment, why introduce something that will make your life more difficult? The Long If that's not your cup of tea, if you want cheap OSes that let you do as you please, well then deal with the fact that you "only" get a decade of support (though sometimes more like with XP).OpenOffice doesn't play nicely with SharePoint, Exchange, or Group Policy. However you pay a ton to buy it, pay even more in maintenance (support isn't free, software or hardware, you have to pay yearly upkeep) and they are going to certify it for certain apps and you'll run those and no other, or lose support. You can run those for decades and even after new version come out, the support continues. They'd say "That is out of warranty, buy a new one." Yet somehow they think MS should have to support their OSes forever.Īlso I'll add you CAN get systems that are supported pretty much perpetually. Also, I'd bet these very same companies would tell me to go away if I brought i one of their products from 10 years ago and wanted support on it. It is just laziness on the part of companies that do this. It isn't like an upgrade has been something you've had to do quick. It was supported for over 10 years (despite the nae it came out in 1999). 2000 was supported when its replacement came out (XP) and when that's replacement came out (Vista) and even for a while when that's replacement came out (7). No company supports a product for all eternity.
People need to stop with this bullshit of wanting to stay on an OS for ever.
0 kommentar(er)
