Discussion on:

OpenOffice saves a company budget

Rather than install any upgrade or new software on the terminal server, and since users without any Office installed at all had no problem printing (according to your post), the least expensive solution would be simply not use Office 2007 for printing templates.

That's what happens when you forget to be a consultant as a result of over-aggressive evangelism, overlook the obvious.

I'm trying to figure out how your solution is supposed to work.

Welcome to Obvious Overlook: Scenic, but a long way down.

He only mentioned that the ones using MS Office 2007 were having problems. Those using Office 2003 or "no Office installed" did not have any problems. So, I know it's dangerous, I'll "assume" users without Office were using some sort of shared instance of Office 2003 from the terminal server to print those documents. Just advise those users with Office 2007 not to use locally installed 07 to print, but use the terminal server print services.
My other thought was how did Jack determine the cost to upgrade all users to Office 07?
There might also have been a bit of self-preservation of continuing revenue involved in the move to OO. Open Office may indeed have been a good solution, but it probably will result in continuing "re-education" of the users, meaning a continuing revenue stream for Jack.

they used the terminal services printing and the LOCAL office 2007 wouldn't let it print for some reason.

my purpose was to solve their problem. this issue had been going on for quite some time. and the owner of the company i work for was the one that did the estimate - i had nothing to do with that (other than being the messenger).

were all local printers. the offices were all remote offices, so the printers were local to their offices.

we tried adding their printers locally to the term serve but that didn't work either.

You solve the situation correctly.

There are always some stupid IT that criticize the way you solve it problems, due they believe they are god.

I think all the criticism on this post is due that people are not open to new ideas.
There is lot of open source software that is better than the payware stuff. And this is the fact.

Jack I think, you think like you think due you are also expert in linux. People like you use the brain to solve and not not criticize.

Jack Wallen keep doing this great job and do not care what people say and even do not react if it is not necessary.

...he did a good thing.

I can't count the number of times a client has said something like, "Just use this disk to install xxx." I then get to explain software licensing to them and I HAVE lost business because I refuse to support bootlegged software.

Herein is the value of open-source software. The two words used together..."legally free."

Do I get paid for my knowledge of it. You bet. You get paid for your work too I bet. People have the option of learning things themselves, paying someone else to do it, or finding some sucker who is willing to work for false praise.

That said, I have no interest in evangelism. If I can save the clients money on licensing LEGALLY, I do.

So, wizard57m, in your distaste of all things Jack, you have to point out that OOo 'probably will result in continuing "re-education" of the users,' - try the move from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 or 2010. That will require no "re-education," right? =)

I upgraded from office 2003 to office 2007, using in a XP VM on Linux wither other office apps I have to use.
I also had OO installed on the linux host but never really used for primary work.
Once I started trying to find my way around office 2007 and being frustrated, I would try what I needed to do in OO, found every time was easy to do what I needed and finally got to using only OO for all of my word processing, spreadsheets and presentations for a while now. Could not be happier. I only keep office 2007 around for any future compatibility issues just in case, However I will not be upgrading again if can help it.

The only real reason to keep Office or parts of it is if you are stuck with having to use Outlook, as there is no OO replacement for that, and other OpenSource Groupware Clients have issues connecting to an exchange Server using MAPI (There can be some exchange connectors for evolution mail or Kontakt available, but those aren't free and don't always work properly).

I use Evolution on Linux with our exchange server and it works just fine. There is a plugin for connecting to Exchange, I believe it's called Exchange Connector.
(CentOS Linux)

Well, if an organization is using Exchange server 2003, then the switch to OOo is very easy and smart... since for email you can use Outlook 2003 for free.

VLK (Corporate) installs of Exchange 2003 allow one free client license of Outlook 2003 for every Exchange CAL installed on the server.. I don't think Exchange 2007 inheritted this MS kindheartedness

The exchange plugin for evolution has been free for a long time now. It originally cost money to license it, but it has been free for at least the last 5 years now.

As for them working properly, I started using it back when it cost money and it has always worked well for me.

I know the exchange connector in evolution is free, but as far as I know it won't work with all exchange server versions. Apart from that, it also depends on how the exchange server is setup. My mail ISP uses exchange, I can use outlook to connect to it, but I can't use MAPI and evolution with the exchange connector for some reason, so I'm left with using imap or worse, pop. As I can't administer that server I can't change that.

As for using the "free" outlook that you get with exchange 2003, that doesn't work under Linux, not even if I use wine. I can install outlook within wine, but I can't setup an exchange account inside it. Pop and imap works, but then I might as well use an OpenSource groupware client. And to have a Windows VM within Linux just for Outlook is overkill.

Previous to exch2007, evolution-brutus is supposed to work for connectivity but it doesn't support 2007 or newer. Evolution-mapi is freely available and supports 2007 and supposedly 2010.

For Debian Squeeze, evolution-mapi is currently in Unstable waiting to be included into Testing (Squeeze) as an exception to the package freeze. (Squeeze now being the frozen Beta of what will be Debian 6 Stable).

With every update of an MS Office product there is always some degree of retraining needed as the interface and feature changes can be enough to boggle the minds of the not so computer savvy users. This retraining rollercoaster is just enough to drive even the most stoic IT pro mad. So you definitely need to take that into consideration whenever going forward with a rollout of even an MS product.

Openoffice is a GREAT product and I use it routinely at home

The only way around it was to AT LEAST remove Office 2007 on the machines. The only way the templates would print properly is if the local machine either had NO office suite or had the same office suite as the term serve. But, if the term serv had OpenOffice, it didn't matter what version of Office the local machines had.

I use OO myself and I recommend it to everyone but there is an insurmountable hurdle for some offices. Software apps like PCLaw only support integration with MS Word or WordPerfect. Find a solution for that and I can save a lot of law offices a bunch of money!

Your suggesting installing Office 2007 locally for all the users as a solution when the "users that had trouble printing had MS Office 2007 installed"?

it's all getting a bit confused. the solutions are thus:

* downgrade all local clients to Office 2003.
* upgrade terminal server office install to 2007.
* remove office 2007 on local machines and install OpenOffice.
* remove MS office on local machines and install nothing.

The cost is still more than simply installing OOo with support for either Office version on the workstation but would installing O2007 on the terminal server require a terminal server or CALs license or simply a single standard workstation seat license? I'm guessing a terminal server or CALs for expected number of terminal connections but it's not something I've looked into.

Wouldn't that probably also require to upgrade the local Office 2003 users to Office 2007? I'd expect that with Office 2007 on TS would move the issue from the local 2007 users to those still using Office 2003.

In this situation it seemed to be a good fit for the company.

Open Office has great features and really does run well. However if you are moving from Microsoft to Open Office there are a number of problems I have run into. Open Office will not support Microsoft auto text as it stands. With a company with many users that are heavy users of Microsoft Word their auto text is very valuable. They know how to bring up sentences and paragraphs that they have saved. You can import the auto text into Open Office but it must be in a form that open office likes. For example if the auto text in Microsoft Word is "If the following principles are true please be advised " the person can type "If the f" and be prompted by Microsoft auto text. However, when imported into OO it doesn't like the space after "if ". It is true that the auto text could be renamed to "ifthef". This would cause a lot of time being lost to renaming, as user's can have a many as 50 - 100 auto texts that they use regularly. Not only would they have to rename the auto text but then remember the new auto text as opposed to the old Microsoft prompt. These two things would take a great deal of time.

Another thing I noticed is that OO did not import Table of Contents that were hyper linked to the page. When you create a table of contents in Microsoft Word you can do a control click on the content and be taken to the Page. This will not import into OO. I'm not even sure this is available in OO.

One last one - If you are editing in Microsoft Word and close the document for the day, when you open it again you can go to the last page you were working on by pressing shift F5. Couldn't find this feature in OO.

If you have started with OO the Auto text problem becomes a moot point but, for those moving from one to the other and much of the work relies on auto text, it is a killer.

Anyone recall the learnnig curve to go from 2003 to 2007? IMO it was a lot less to go to OO.o. I do worry though about some of the early bugs stll in OO.o that they won't seem to fix, especially creating/revising an envelope for windowed envelopes or odd sizes such as greeting cards at Chritsmas, etc., and it inability to keep large numbers of images properly in place. That's mostly because the default hook is wrong and it's easy to fix if you do it BEFORE insterting a hundred or so graphcis, especially if you stuck them into a table. And yes, I'm talking the latest version of OO.o.

If they jump on these shortcomings, then I beleve it will be a good thing; otherwise no. Such things are often discussed on ther newsgroup at news.gmane.org or (God forbid), the mailing list or forum. The ng is tightly tied to the forum and so works a lot better IMO.

It would only be a killer to one who thinks OO is an exact replacement for MS Orrice, which it is not. The changes and learning curve, in fact and IMO, are much less than going from MS 2003 to MS 2007.
I do think they have a few bugs they are ignoring, but OO also has capabilities above and beyond that of MS Office, so I'm hoping Lbre will address those bugs.

I can confirm savings and success.

Five years ago in company I am working for, about 70 users switched to OO. Aprox 100 templates, previously made by MsOffice 2000, were converted to OO templates, simple by Open and SaveAs OO templates.
Many of them where protected in order to make work input fields, list fields or check boxes. Templates also had different first page and headers and protected sections.
Despite all, conversion passed smoothly as described.

Many users dind't even realised changes. Few of them only light instructions needed.
Probably very well formed templates help here. Templates are grouped for each department. Starting from common group (Fax form and company letter what everybody need), Purchasing, Sales, Design and Technology department, Quality control department, Management, HR all saved centrally on commonly mapped network drive.
Only one licence of MSOffice kept for resolving special situations.

Here are few benefits as result working with OO that are not mentioned in previous posts:

- Whenever one finish editing doc. Word always tried to save new Normal.dot at the central templates folder what was forbiden but also anoying for users. No such conflict with OO.
- OO never had ever lost any document what was regular situation with MSOff. Automatic recovery in OO working perfect.
- Templates as well all documents become smaller in size. Average 60% of MS size.
- In MS Word 2000 and previous, I noticed wierd and excessive grow in size of any Word document. Users normally like to use old document and SaveAs new one to save typing. In such cases it was common to get single page fax document arise up to 5Mb and more (while 100k was expected as normal). Never found why. Imagine to sent such file by mail. Or, imagine such disk space waste.
No such behaviour with OO.

Total savings about 50.000U$ plus almost same amount everytime when company have to make ugrade.

what now?

Being seporated or forked away from Oracle is hardly defunct. It shows that there is clearly development continuing. Heck, being out of Oracle/Sun's overbearing hands may greatly improve the rate of development. In the past, Sun's need for control has driven developers away; StarOffice is a direct result of Sun rejecting code contributions.

There likely will not be a new OO versions, therefore I'm claiming it defunct.

From what I've read so far, it is indeed a fork based Oracle's code base not Oracle's own OOo development department being removed from Oracle. Oracle hasn't stated discontinuation of OOo development. With future plans for a browser based office suite, it's likely OOo will merge into that; possibly it'll become a companion like MS Office with MS Office Live.

As a brand, the "OpenOffice.org" label may be on it's way down hill but OpenOffice.org as a program or code base is indeed continuing toward healthier development.

There is quite the noise about it happening in the OSNews article discussion presently.

play for common good?

Who said Oracle was focused on the common good? Where do you get that tangent from?

Since Oracle has not announced discontinuation of there own development of OOo codebase, we don't have any basis for claiming they have stopped development. We have also not suggested that they are continuing development for any particular reason let alone reasons outside of business interests.

The fork of OOo is under a completely separate organization from Oracle and it's development department.

Since when does an open source project need corporate bullying err... backing?

THere is always Google Cloud liiks and feels very nice....

is bloated garbage though.
it requires JAVA to perform most tasks associated with working with templates.
and that alone makes it completely unusable.

We converted over to OO over a year ago, and all our offices run a ton of templates. We do not run into any issues at all. Works like a dream.

the mere fact is uses JAVA makes it useless, no matter if it works or not.
the use of JAVA is an absolute failure on usability in and of itself.

You have a most intriguing notion of what defines "useless" and useful. If something supports the business and works effectively then it is, in my book, useful. Java is quite universal, and therefore well supported. Do you have some religious aversion to it? (rhetorical question) I personally use office 2010 most of the time rather than openoffice for several reasons, but i do sure appreciate that oo is a great piece of software considering its lack of traditional business model and it is surely more than adequate for 90% + of workers.

just an absolute hatred for anything that worships bad coding "hardware is cheap" like Java does.

so anything using Java is useless, since I'm not about to WASTE MONEY buying more hardware to use it.

I have to admit that I am less than enthusiastic about Java, but I won't dismiss solutions straight out of the box because of it. I would need something more tangible.

We tested Open Office and compared it to MS Office, both 2003 and 2007, on several platforms. Open office, starting from scratch takes roughly the same amount of time to start as MS Office 2007, and only slightly more than 2003. With the exception of one massively cross-linked spreadsheet we use, all run equally fast.

I would have to call the MS Office 2003 and 2007 bloated since they just stay abreast of Open Office which runs using Java.

My question is why should I pay good money for Office 2007 ($5700.00 for my organization) when it fails to distinguish itself from a free solution? Further, it represents a learning curve (ribbon interface), and compatibility issues (docx), which makes it just as much of a problem as Open Office if not slightly more.

The bottom line in any business case is the age old question: "what's in it for me?". What benefit do we get by spending $5700.00 and upgrading to Office 2007 as opposed to migrating to Open Office? I came up with nothing, so we migrated some time ago. I have yet to find an insurmountable issue.

you pay good money for extra hardware because some dimwit picked java for MACROS?

I don't. Period. Software must run on the platforms I have, not the other way around. I will upgrade hardware on my schedule, dictated primarily by our IT budget.

Java, .NET, and most other newer programming technologies are built with Hardware is cheap as a development model, making the software using them require more hardware.
so using a app that requires Java etc means you will likely need to get more hardware to upgrade software.

oops, you already skip software upgrade if it means buying more hardware.

I just went one step further, no software that uses hardware is cheap for a development model.
[ maybe that's why I have a p3 with 256mb sdram still usable, no bloatware. ]

"the mere fact is uses JAVA makes it useless, no matter if it works or not."

Thanks, it's not often that I see such a great example of a self-contradictory statement.

Dogma: set of ideas that may be argued and interpreted but whose fundamental validity may not be questioned.

Personally, I've just converted to OO under Windows 7 on a Lenovo U160 laptop. It opens faster than Word 2007 or sibling Excel and has been an entirely pleasant experience.

I'm about to celebrate my religious conversion to OO with a bottle of upmarket scotch. :-D

love wasting money on extra hardware just to do what you need, because of java / bloatware development then.