[ Thanks to Roger
Moore for this article. ]
Listening to the National Public Radio on my way home last
night, I heard a report mentioning that experts predict, once
again, a very active hurricane season this year. This morning, at
work, I read Groklaw and
found links to screenshots of the latest MS Office
applications.
I am an IT Manager, so the first thing that comes to my mind
when I see this is not “whoa cool, new toys with more eye candy!”
but “oh no, how am I going to integrate this? Will it work on our
existing servers, or will I have to upgrade them again? How long
will I be able to hold on to our existing versions of Office
(Office 2003, by the way) before being forced to upgrade by
incoming mail attachments in the new format? Would it be viewed as
irresponsible on my part to not upgrade and forgo MS’s support?”
All of a sudden the news about the next hurricane season came to
mind again, but with a vision of a huge MS logo in front of it.
Personally, I have been using OpenOffice.org for years. I even
installed it on my business manager’s computer so that he could get
a feel for it and for the most part he likes it. His only gripe was
that his Excel formula-writing skills do not seamlessly migrate,
but he acknowledges that that is a reasonable compromise. Everyone
else in the office uses MS Office. We are an architectural firm, so
Linux is out of the question as desktop OS for now since our main
application, Autodesk Architectural Desktop, is only available on
Windows. However, I have been slowly introducing some free software
into our environment.
Everyone is encouraged to use Firefox. Everyone uses
KeePass to store
their passwords. And, recently those that received the latest
computer upgrades received The Gimp instead of Photoshop,
in spite of owning valid Photoshop licenses.
I haven’t yet dared to install OpenOffice.org on everyone’s
computer. Why? Well, for one, because I am relatively new in this
company. But also because it really offers no obvious
functional benefits for the users over their current office suite
(although I think the AutoComplete feature in OpenOffice is
awesome). Our firm sends and receives a lot of Word documents as
email attachments and I would hate to have our users complaining
about formating lost in translation (even though I can count in one
hand the number of mistranslated documents that I have ran across
in all my years of using OpenOffice).
And then if we were to deploy OpenOffice, what format should we
choose to save our files on? Yes, I know all about the advantages
of ODF
(Open Document Format) for data retention, but are we willing to
incur the cost of the complexity introduced by having to deal with
two document formats? Policies will have to be implemented and
users trained on them, for what to do when Word documents are
received from the outside, and what format to use when sending
documents to the outside. The latter one is the one that worries me
most.
If we were to implement ODF for internal use, should we continue
sending MS format files to the outside? That would mean that the
users have to remember to save the files on the right format for
the right circumstance, and this is bound to fail once in a while.
On the other hand we could simply send ODF files to the outside,
maybe with a brief explanatory note about what it is and how to
open it. But, how would our contacts feel about that? Sure,
OpenOffice.org is available without cost, but so is the metric
system, and we all know how well received it was here in the USA.
In spite of all its benefits, the metric system was finally
abandoned, and the ones promoting it simply gave up. Will the same
thing happen to ODF? Fortunately, at the moment, momentum seems to
be on the side of ODF.
In Europe ODF is being received
quite well. In Massachusetts, ODF continues its march towards
becoming the state’s official
document format. The ODF
Alliance seems to be quite busy and have prepared some great
informational
materials to use in this cause. All of this sure is
encouraging, and makes one feel not so alone in the struggle.
How far is our firm willing to subject itself to the MS
dictatorship? I guess that is a business decision that my business
manager will have to make. I will speak to him about these issues
and see what he decides. If he wants to try the ODF route, I will
be all for it. If he thinks that continuing to pay the MS expense
is the way he wants to go, at least I know what to do next.
Our friends in New Orleans still have some time to try to
prepare for next hurricane season. The rest of us still have some
time to try to prepare for the next MS Office. However, in both
cases, the time is very short. If you want to help build a levy
against the next MS Office upgrade, the time to do it is now. If
you are an IT person, now is time to talk to your business manager
about the alternatives to MS. If you manage a business, are you
informed enough about this alternatives so as to be able to make a
sound and informed decision? Don’t believe everything you hear by
marketeers. The alternatives are real and they are great. However,
action is needed, and it is needed now.