The case for MSOffice Migration

[CyberNerd]

Apologies in advance, this is another MSOffice vs OpenOffice thread.

 

I have been asked to write a report for the senior team to outline the case for an OpenOffice migration.

I need to write a balanced report and I am struggling with legitimate reasons as to why we would consider a MSOffice 2003 -> MSOffice2007 -> MSoffice2010 strategy over the next three years.

 

What is a "showcase/example" business case for deploying MSOffice across the curriculum ?

[pete]

You have courses / diplomas that explicitly specify $foo (we do).

You're an Adult Education provider that offers training in those packages (we are).

You have mission-critical software that relies on office components in order to function (kind of - there are workarounds, but they're dirty dirty hacks) - SIMS, Sage software, certain CAD software for Engineering courses etc.

You want one office package across the whole site, not a kids/staff divide between free and paid for or the "it worked at home, why doesn't it work at school".

 

We're going from Office 2000 as our baseline (2003 on Admin machines for SIMS) to 2007 for a melange of the above reasons. 80% of our Office Suite needs would be fulfilled by OpenOffice, but that 20% that wouldn't be fulfilled needs to be usuable on nearly every machine in the school, so annoying as it is, we can't put it off any longer.

[karlieb]

Also Microsoft are planning to offer an education version of Office 2010 including specific education software (e.g. Semblio).

 

There will also be a host of other education tools included, although these have not been officially announced yet....