Anyone ditched MS Office yet?

[KWestos]

Anyone got rid of office and gone open source to save a few quid on licensing. If so, has this had an affect on SIMS reporting etc or any other application, exam board.

[AngryITGuy]

We were just discussing this as an option this morning, but it would only be for the students here as I was under the impression that SIMS Reporting and other features required MS Office to function.

[sparkeh]

We were just discussing this as an option this morning, but it would only be for the students here as I was under the impression that SIMS Reporting and other features required MS Office to function.

 

Yeah I am under that impression too. I think SIMS requires MS Office and Open Office isn't compatible.

[penfold]

Was discussed in the last place I worked. Unfortunately they found the database too difficult to get to grips with and stayed with MS Office. I ended up putting OO on the machines too but it was requested that it was removed by some members of staff as it was causing a little confusion with what pupils where using. This wasn't possible as not all areas of the school had MS Office installed so OO was their only office package. And you just know that people aren't capable of using Save As to make sure you can open it elsewhere:rolleyes:

[Ric_]

I've taken the liberty of adding a pole above - I was actually planning on asking this anyway.

 

With the desire to work remotely via Citrix, licensing of MS Office is a nightmare - read 'damn near impossible' - and looking ahead to the innevitable upgrade from our existing 2003 licenses to 2007 just to upgrade what we have now would be in the region of £12k!

 

It is just not sustainable to stick with MS Office. I know that there is the argument that MS Office is an 'industry standard' but there is also the argument that we should be teaching transferable skills... and what happens if the kids move to France where very few people use MS Office now?

 

I think it is also unfair to expect pupils to purchase MS Office for use at home... even £40 for a student edition is far too much for some and we should not be advocating software piracy.

[tech_guy]

Pole - is that someone from Poland? Or do you mean poll?

[Geoff]

Along with OO.org, has anyone looked at Google Apps as a possible replacement?

[linescanner]

Some of the issue is that the exam boards (should be vendor neutral) are not.

They still say things like open excel spreadsheet etc.

I run our company off Open Office and have had very very few issues. I have a school of 650 pupils that are using Star Office 8 on Linux desktops.....the kids are fine, the staff took a bit of time to learn new ways.

 

You need quite a bit of SLT support to get it through. The move is probably less painful than 2003-2007.

 

Open Office can be set to auto save in .doc format also to help the migration

[HodgeHi]

The resolution needs to come from above. I mean the LEA and others like these that insist on sending documents through in Office format. We have no need to go to 2007 but the LEA send documents though in 2007 format. Now i have to install the file converter for them. If they used neutral formats then it wouldn't be a problem. Only if the docs have vb that isn't supported by others, should the MS Office format be used. I currently run iWork '08 on the OS X side and Office 2003 on the Windows side here. Office 2003 in the admin area, with the exception of the deputy head who uses Pages throughout and to be honest loves using it and now never uses Office 2003 at all.

 

Just a pain to remember to save as a .doc format as sending .pages through hotmail is a nightmare

[Ric_]

Pole - is that someone from Poland? Or do you mean poll?

 

You mean you can't see the dancer in my office

[Ric_]

The resolution needs to come from above. I mean the LEA and others like these that insist on sending documents through in Office format. We have no need to go to 2007 but the LEA send documents though in 2007 format. Now i have to install the file converter for them. If they used neutral formats then it wouldn't be a problem. Only if the docs have vb that isn't supported by others, should the MS Office format be used. I currently run iWork '08 on the OS X side and Office 2003 on the Windows side here. Office 2003 in the admin area, with the exception of the deputy head who uses Pages throughout and to be honest loves using it and now never uses Office 2003 at all.

 

Just a pain to remember to save as a .doc format as sending .pages through hotmail is a nightmare

 

There are ADM files available to force OOo to save in .doc and to force Word to save in .odt (and likewise for other filetypes). OOo now reads and writes Office 2007 files too.

[sparkeh]

Yeah I am under that impression too. I think SIMS requires MS Office and Open Office isn't compatible.

 

Just checked specs and MS Office is required.

[flyinghaggis]

Just to put a bit of balance in the argument my opinion is that MS Office (especially in 2007 guise) is way ahead of Open Office (and Star Office) in terms of features and functionality. We've looked at migrating in the past but other than the costs savings there aren't any good reasons to move away from Microsoft Office IMO.

[Ric_]

Just to put a bit of balance in the argument my opinion is that MS Office (especially in 2007 guise) is way ahead of Open Office (and Star Office) in terms of features and functionality. We've looked at migrating in the past but other than the costs savings there aren't any good reasons to move away from Microsoft Office IMO.

 

I'm glad that you are balancing the argument slightly... which features do you think that OOo is lacking at the moment.

 

Obviously VB support is poor and certain API calls are different - hence the need to keep MS Office for SIMS use.

 

Remote access is seen as a high priority for our school to allow 'anywhere learning' and the restrictive per-device licensing model of the MS Office family means it is impossible for us to license it. OOo may not have an identical featureset but it is sufficiently similar for our needs (excluding SIMS use).

[sparkeh]

Just another SIMS point: As teachers are encouraged more and more to use SIMS in the classroom, we are forced to use MS Office on those classroom machines. If we are using it on teachers machines, I can't see that we can then use OO everywhere else.

 

Don't want to sound negative, I would love to ditch MS Office, well MS in general but I can't see a way round this one unless SIMS supports OO at some point.

[CyberNerd]

We have the sun odt plugin installed sitewide.

Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office - Get It

and we already have hundreds of ODT files onsite so it would be really simple to switch. (a reg key sets it as default save format

 

The blatant SIMS lock-in is the only technical reason we keep MSOffice. All teaching depts we spoke to have no problem with using OOO instead.

Eventually MSOffice will wither on the vine as it becomes less relevant. Most people don't know the difference, and the ones that do soon see Ooo has more features that interest them than MSOffice (2003) anyway - I mean the actual useful features like save to pdf, convert to wiki format, use a mysql database rather than having a facelift.

[CyberNerd]

The resolution needs to come from above. I mean the LEA and others like these that insist on sending documents through in Office format. We have no need to go to 2007 but the LEA send documents though in 2007 format. Now i have to install the file converter for them. If they used neutral formats then it wouldn't be a problem.

 

 

BECTA have been saying this since 2005, they recommend ODF in the 'technical specification for institutional infrastructure' .

OpenOffice ( and most other office suites) support ODF files

[DMcCoy]

From a management point of view OO has a long way to go on windows and OSX. The ADM version is not free is it?

 

Even Office and iwork can be configured with managed preferences on OS X.

[ZeroHour]

One thing to consider also is what would replace outlook if you stripped Office out?

Web based email stuff is okay but its not as fancy as full outlook and our staff hated OWA to use all the time.

You could use pop/imap mode in some clients but its not as good as full outlook I believe.

I am all for office 2007, I think its amazing and well worth the cash as it will generally improve productivity for most. I have never been amazed with OO and I just see it as okay. I know people that hate it when working with tables in the Writer part as they have layout issues etc where as office was a breeze.

 

EDIT: El' reg has a review of it for linux now http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/04/openoffice_three_dot_o_review/

[webman]

One thing to consider also is what would replace outlook if you stripped Office out?

Web based email stuff is okay but its not as fancy as full outlook and our staff hated OWA to use all the time.

 

The Zimbra AJAX web client does everything Outlook does and more.

[flyinghaggis]

The Zimbra AJAX web client does everything Outlook does and more.

 

What kind of pricing are you looking at on an annual basis for using Zimbra Email?

[webman]

We pay nothing to use Zimbra - it is free open-source software. The server hardware cost just under £2,000.

[ZeroHour]

Zimbra is expensive (for push email parts - yes we do need push email) and would require replacing exchange in our situation and thats before we get to the fact yahoo own it and I hate yahoo junk with a passion. They will stitch you all in the end (my conspiracy theory there)

Zimbra also is not exactly as fully featured as outlook but they are limited by ajax tbh as certain things just wont work due to the way IE etc security is. One big thing I suppose is you cant do a mail merge email.

[torry_loon]

We have been using OpenOffice and OpenDocument for the last 2 years.

 

It is easy to do if you aren't already locked-in to technologies like Exchange, VB, SIMS or some of the proprietary VLEs.

[Midget]

I'd love to move away from MSO but unfortunately OOo is just not as good as MSOXP/2003 for usability (I HATE 2007) and it is quite clear it was designed by a coder, not a designer. Also as we use exchange, we are tied to Outlook.

 

If OOo want to replace MSO then they have to either get a fully working Outlook replacement, or an exchange replacement.

 

SaaS is never good enough for most heavy users. so AJAX/Silverlight/etc are no good.

Edited November 5, 2008 by Midget