Can a free “office suite” really be useful in business?

Is OpenOffice.org 3 Ready for Business?

You can not discount the power of collaborative software development. After 20 years of community development, OpenOffice.org 3 is being used in business around the world. It is easy to use and allows you to save documents in a format that is approved by the International Organization for Standardization. If it is necessary to collaborate with other business people who are still locked into their vendor’s non-compliant document standards, OpenOffice.org 3 will allow you to downgrade your ODF documents to the format your colleagues are bound to by their current office software.

“OpenOffice.org v3 is the result of over twenty years’ of software engineering. A completely open development process means that anyone can report bugs, request new features, or enhance the software.”

What is OpenOffice.org?

OpenOffice.org 3 is the opensource version of the licensed StarOffice product available from Sun Microsystems.

“Anyone used to commercial software and its hyping and marketing speak will find OpenOffice.org 3 refreshingly different.”

“OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. ”

Technical support is available free of charge from community-sponsored sources (forums, mailing lists, etc.) or as a fee-based service from various third-party providers.

If You Prefer Licensed Software – Star Office May be an Alternative

If you like software packaged in shiny boxes with associated licensing fees and toll free numbers to call for help…

If you do want commercial support, the same software is also available as a fully supported and packaged product under the StarOffice brand from Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s most respected IT companies.

One user of StarOffice wrote “ I have Office 2007 and StarOffice 8 installed. I am constantly going to back to StarOffice because it is much easier to use and has more accessible features. Sure, many features are in Office 2007, but spending 30 minutes to find them is not my idea of “efficiency”. I love StarOffice.” — Brian B, Texas, USA

In addition to all of the components included with OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems bundles a number of additional applications and software components. Sun charges a fee for StarOffice, which it distributes under a relatively lenient, but still proprietary, software license.

StarOffice is easily purchased online and currently sells for $44.45 CAD. It is available for 5 operating systems.

What to Expect from a Transition to OpenOffice.org

Like any software, you should expect a transition or learning period when you upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3 from your current office suite – after all, it’s not the same software.  What you will find is that it is similar to the previous version of Mircosoft Office. It is user friendly and provides that majority of functionality that most day to day users enjoy. It runs smoothly on most operating systems and if it does crash it has incredible crash recovery. I have never lost a document in draft because of a crash.

What Not to Expect

You should not expect a heavily bloated office suite with hidden functionality that most business users will never use. You should not expect to be forced to “re-learn” how the office suite works every time there is a new version released because of radical user interface changes. You should not expect a major new version every 12 months that deprecates the prior version and forces you to “keep up” with the Jones’. Hmm, maybe that was a bit “over the top”… sorry.

Summary

In 2000 Sun released the StarOffice source code base under an open-source license, this started the OpenOffice.org project.

Open-source is a way to improve and develop software by utilizing the power of collaboration and communities – there is no denying that this power is what the Internet has given us as a gift.

Yes, I am an advocate of OpenOffice.org

It has served our business well and I am excited about the future of this project. Sun continues to provide key support to the project’s developer community. Since releasing the source code to the opensource community Sun’s developers have used “snapshots” of the OpenOffice.org code base for StarOffice releases.

Use OpenOffice.orgWe switched to OpenOffice as a standard over 18 months ago and continue to use it today. It runs gracefully on our PC’s, MAC and Linux operating systems (yes, we use them all). I have won a lot of work through proposals generated from OpenOffice. The recipients of our business proposals received PDF documents… it didn’t matter to anyone what office software I chose.

Learn more about OpenOffice.org here.

This respectful view was inspired by Stuart’s posting here, titled “OpenOffice is not for business“”.

Cheers

David A. West

Follow me on Twitter: davidawest

PS – we are just preparing, and in early beta, of our new business proposal software. Watch for it coming soon.

David West on March 15, 2009 | Filed Under Non-Specific Ramblings, general business

9 Comments

Will  on March 15th, 2009

If every time software didn’t work properly we said it wasn’t ready for business there would be no software in existence.

David West  on March 15th, 2009

I couldn’t agree with you more… as I sit here updating my blog on Ubuntu :-)

Jacob  on March 16th, 2009

One important item is the availability on several platforms. A responsible ITperson or Business Executive having a say in ITsystem-upgrades or replacements should always make an effort to become platform-independent.

Then the company can pick the solutions that serves them best in any area. If that means a server with Microsoft running or 5 MacBook Pros for those who needs/prefers that, its fine.

The point is valid also in terms of hardware/pherperials. Even when operating in a 100% Microsoft environment, purchases should be made ensuring that different choices may come into play at a later stage.

Personally I never purchase any hardware that is not compatible with at least Microsoft, Apple and Linux. (Oh yes – my laptop CAN be used with OSX 10.5.X).

Peder  on March 16th, 2009

To be fair, you also shouldn’t expect a business heavily invested in VBA macros to be able to switch without interference. Also some other business critical systems (sadly) might require Word/Excel.

I think it’s important not to sink to unnecessary MS bashing and instead just keep with the good facts about OOo and acknowledge the possible drawbacks.

David West  on March 16th, 2009

Peder, I agree to a degree with your comments. OO is not for everyone. I don’t believe that I made any negative comments about MS and certainly didn’t bash anyone… the point is that there are choices in the world. I support your continued use of MS Office. Cheers.

Peder  on March 17th, 2009

As you acknowledged yourself, I find your “What Not to Expect” to be unnecessarily “over the top”, borderlining bashing.

But I guess you’ll be pleased to know that the school I’m IT tech for have been running StarOffice more or less exclusively since 2003 (as a deal between Sun and the Swedish schools we got versions 6-8 for free) and now there are plans to try to migrate as many of the municipal workers as possible to OOo as well.
And if you read my comments on Mr Crawfords site you can see that I really disagrees with most of his views.

Peder  on March 17th, 2009

…and the only thing my Windows partition at home has been used for in the last 7-8 years is occationally running a synth editor that doesn’t work in Wine, since it has no working USB support yet, and trying out some free VSTi plugins that Wine can’t handle either.

Mike  on April 3rd, 2009

I have used Start Office in past but then left it because MSOFFICE was the next piece of application which was decided by our Company’s I.T experts. Anyways, I got a copy of Openoffice with standard installation of UBUNTU. I’ll say, I am more than happy to use it.

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