[openoffice - 3] Using OpenOffice in schools

[SteveCIS]

Hi,

 

Does anyone have experience of using OpenOffice across school. We are an infant school with 200+ desktop and laptop machines and are considering moving to OpenOffice. Currently our Year 1 children use Office but our Year 2 children use Textease so we need to rationalise this with one package accross the whole school. It's going to cost us £2400 (60 x £40) to licence our 60 Year 2 laptops, hence we are considering OpenOffice.

 

Has anyone else done this and are there any known pitfalls or problems ?

 

Thanks in advance.

Steve.

[p858snake]

It's going to cost us £2400 (60 x £40) to licence our 60 Year 2 laptops,

You might want to ask around on here (from people such as the sponsors).... people can do several hundered win 7 licenses for £3000.... surly office can be done cheaper than that for just 40 machines...

[CyberNerd]

Only real problems are teacher user acceptance, and some problems with application data folder redirects. Kids won't have any issues with it.

Also consider Google Apps - it's free for education, works fine in secondary so I doubt you would have problems in a primary school

[unixman]

We used it exclusively in my previous school and as another poster said, teacher acceptance was the major stumbling block. The students didn't really care.

 

We were completely Linux and there were minor compatibility issues with students bringing in work done on their home M$ Word; this mostly was if they had used an oddball font. We got around that by issuing each student with a modified version of the OpenCD, which contained Windows ports of all the software used on the student machines, and at the same software level. If they used this (the choice was theirs), then there were no compatibility issues. If they didn't (eg they had used M$ Word and saved in the then new docx format, which we couldn't open), we *might* convert them, depending on how busy we were, how we felt, etc.

 

The only real stumbling block was Microsoft Access files; the Windows version of OO could import these but the Linux version couldn't (doh!). We used to tell the students to do database projects either in OO Base or MySQL.

[kesomir]

I use it across my network - children and staff have no issues with it.

 

Only pitfalls are that you can't set up client settings via group policy like you can with ms office, but I use mandatory profiles which negates that.

 

I've just upgraded all the clients from openoffice to libreoffice though which is the new name for open office (politics with oracle means the project has been forked and all the other contributors have gone with the fork, leaving ooo mostly dead in the water)

 

LibreOffice Productivity Suite Download » LibreOffice

[p858snake]

Wasn't there a ADM pack floating around for OO so it could be controlled by GP? Edited May 28, 2011 by p858snake