Can OpenOffice replace MS Office

microsoft-officeopenoffice

We are starting to do some project and application roadmapping, and am thinking about OpenOffice (and StarOffice) as a replacement for OfficeXP and Office 2000, which is on the bulk of our PCs.

  • Roughly 120 users and PCs
  • OE Windows XP Pro on virtually all desktops.
  • Office 2000, Office XP, properly licensed (knock on wood).
  • No Software Assurance
  • Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory
  • MS Exchange 2003 – not sure yet about Exchange 2008
  • Outlook 2003 on top of lower Office installs
  • "newish" but aging PC inventory .. very little change in the last 12 months.
  • Windows SharePoint Server for the intranet .. it's use is growing

How much should I consider the Open Source alternatives?

What sort of things should I be concerned about?

What hidden issues and second-order consequences should I be aware of?

I am looking forward to hearing pros and cons, and any other comments.

Best Answer

Every year or two, I install OpenOffice and the problem is the same - documents don't format/translate quite right to/from their MS Office counterparts.

It doesn't seem to be overly wacko-paranoid to observe that Microsoft is good at stamping out competition. All they need to do is tweak things just a bit in each service pack & patch to make sure things don't translate quite right, and they continue to lock me in, because I don't have the resources to handle the additional support requests.

I think this is surmountable if:

  • your users are extremely flexible
  • most documents leave your office in a different format (say, PDF)
  • you don't do a lot of document sharing outside the organization

Otherwise, I'd say the business disruption is more costly than the licenses (unfortunately).

Related Topic