Discussion on:

10 ways to stretch your small business IT budget

Nice if you can really do without it. Our experience with OpenOffice was that some users were frustrated by their spreadsheets or presentations not working properly and therefore demanded to keep MS Office. I had a lot of sympathy with that. The free suites are OK for some staff but with others we've actually ended up spending more because they later decided they needed MS Office, meaning we had to buy a retail copy rather than the cheaper OEM version with the PC.

There's also an overhead in supporting a mixed environment, and we have problems with OpenOffice users needing help to read MS Office files and vice versa. When you take the total cost of ownership into account, given that some users really do need MS Office, I don't know how much the open source option really saves us.

However, there may be specific users within an organization that could go without Office. Someone doing accounting will probably need Excel and maybe even Access. A receptionist may need only OpenOffice or even Word Pad.

I once went to a training evaluation where an organization was switching mail clients to Outlook. Although the trainees were supposed to be end-users, the departments sent 'computer-savvy' people. These were the people I'd assume could pick up how to use Outlook (if they didn't use it at home) the fastest. The result? Most of them had no clue! One of the issues was how hard it was to transition to the 'Send' button to send an Email message! So how is the 'average' user going to react to OpenOffice? WordPad? This suggestion makes sense, but won't fly. Your receptionist example will look at it and take offense that she doesn't rate highly enough in the company to get MS Word. What happens the first time she receives a .doc or .docx file?

I was running our software pretty lean with older versions, and told some people with newer versions all they needed to do was use the 'Save As' option so their documents would be compatible with everyone else. They refused, saying it would take up 'too much of their valuable time', and that it was the OTHER user's responsibility to have an up-to-date version. Their managers backed them, "How cheap are we that we can't get new software for our people?" and so it goes. I imagine this behaviour is pretty widespread, or a lot more of us would still be using Office 2000 or other options.

Cost? I looked into separate licensing costs for my users, and for a very small extra cost I could put the Office Basic Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook) onto each desktop as opposed to fiddling with one or two apps and tracking licenses.

The thing with dropping MS Office, is that there are programs that will not work with things like Google Apps, LibreOffice or OpenOffice. For example, you're in an Architectural program that is able to export to Excel... but it will not even recognize this to be installed, and will not allow you to use this feature. Exporting simply to a file location with a .csv or .xls format is not an option. Now, the fact that other programs need to have this ability is another topic. But my point is this...if you're an IT Admin, don't roll this change out in your environment before testing your applications that integrate with MS Office.

I am going to go with you on this. It's a good idea to have ONE copy of a current version of MS Office around in case you need it for whatever. Probably the largest majority of your (Office-suite-type) tasks can be handled as, or more effectively with the mentioned substitutes. Your personnel can't be bothered to save a document in another format? Unfortunately, NCIC's Gibb's favorite motivator (a good smack across the top of the head) is not acceptable in most modern work environments. That being said, however, there are acceptable equivalents available, such as not awarding an annual cost-of-living adjustment and/or questioning that persons company loyalty etc.
It should be noted that many Linux desktop solutions are complete with most software packages that most users require - to include the office-type suite fully installed.
I'm looking forward to the article, "10 more ways to stretch your SMB Budget", which I'm sure that you'll get from responses to this article.
BTW, my computers are set up dual-boot with Linux. After all, you do have a back-up power solution don't you? How about a back up Operating System / Business suite? Think about it

How many "small" businesses have Linux support? "In-house, migrate, replace, Implement" all those sound like they cost money too. Not too mention the hard and soft costs of retraining staff. How about better managing existing assets? How about more training to better utilize existing assets? I do agree though with one point. These would probably safe-guard your job as the IT person - or get you fired.

My favorite is SpiceWorks, it is free and has a small footprint. It does WAY more than tickets.