I would have thought that working in a small business would have made it
easier to adopt alternatives to M$ software. I work in a business with
about 17 full time personnel. Up to two years ago we had to work with a
motley collection of PC's running on Win 95, 98 and Me, using various
versions of M$ Office. When our Director decided to update our network
and buy new machines he asked me to manage the job. Although I didn't
manage to eliminate M$ software entirely, we are running on Win XP,
there is no M$ office software on any of our PC's. The transition to
OpenOffice.org was quick, painless and very cost effective. All I had to
do was show that OOo could do the jobs we wanted done, that it could
read any M$ documents that we had already produced and could produce M$
format documents if required by a client. Job done - No problem.
Terry W
Ross Bernheim wrote:
Derek,
In small businesses there are as many if not more impediments to
adopting alternatives such as Open Office. I work in a small company.
When I started, there were two of us, the owner and myself.
His is a MS Windows, MS Office, Publisher, etc. user. I am primarily
a Mac
user and to some extent Linux user. The owner got an IBM laptop with XP
Home. He got an IBM desktop with XP Home for the part time receptionist/
office person. I used an old Mac from home initially with Word Perfect
for
the Mac.
When I outgrew the old Mac, I got an eMac for work as it was the only one
that would fit under the riser for the workbench where it was to be
located
and it was the least expensive. Boss offered to get MS Office for it
and I
said no. I put Open Office on it and have been very happy with it.
As we expanded and added a full time office person and another production
person, MS continued to dominate. I did get the office person and other
production person to put OOo on their machines and they use it some of
the time. Particularly when MS Word won't print and OOo does.
Boss still won't deal with other than MS Office.
On the back end, I did get him to go for a Samba server running on Linux.
Took an old $30 PII 266 machine and added a 160GB drive and Debian
Linux for an inexpensive and reliable file server.
We have added 2 machines that are MS Windows XP based because we
need to run software that only works under Windows. These have been
EDA software and PLM software. The EDA machine also has Office on it
since that is what the people who use it are used to. The PLM server is
running on a machine that is in my area and also runs an instance of the
PLM client software. I have OOo on it instead of Office. So far the
only problem
is that the PLM software expects MS Office so I cannot import Excel files
into the PLM database without it. It means that I have to convert the
file to
a text file and import that way. A minor annoyance but not a showstopper
as I do not need to import too many files that way.
The interesting thing is that the office admin person tried OOo at
home and
found that it was easier to just use MS Word to trade files with the
people
in college classes she is taking. The production person uses OOo and not
MS Word at home.
It will be a long hard ongoing effort to unseat MS Windows or any of
the MS
Office components from their dominant position. I have a number of
computers
at home and all have OOo not MS Office on them. So I am a 'success
story' but
many others are not there yet.
Certainly small businesses are a good place to put forth the effort to
make them
aware of the advantages of OOo. Expecting a high percentage of them to
either
use or switch to OOo is unrealistic at this point. Working towards
having a
greater awareness of OOo and higher adoption rates is very realistic.
Ross Bernheim
On Sep 19, 2006, at 17:13, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I think some of the greatest opportunities for software alternatives
like Open Office and Linux exist in small business, where the
entrepreneurial spirits are highest and budgets are lowest. Workers
there are more likely to make an extra effort to learn new things and
challenge the status quo for their own sakes.
Derek Wilson
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