PLEASE TAKE ME OFF THE MAILING LIST!- OR DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW??? TOo
many messages for my box!
THank You,
On Sep 20, 2006, at 2:25 PM, Terence W C Warby wrote:
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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