Los Angeles to Consider Open Source Software 324
lientz writes "According to an article at FederalComputerWeek, the city of Los Angeles is considering using Open Source software as a cost cutting measure. From the article: "...city officials could save $5.2 million by switching to OpenOffice... rather than purchasing a Microsoft Office product at $200 per license for 26,000 desktops. The savings would go to a special fund to hire more employees for the police department, a major focus for city officials right now, he added.""
Re:OpenOffice Access (Score:3, Informative)
1. make your Access database an ODBC datasource.
2. Start any Open Office app and click Tools--->Data sources.
This is under MS Windows, which is what they're still using....
I know. Certainly not a replacement. But it is there...
Well (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Negotiating Ploy? (Score:3, Informative)
"Where's the grammar checker?"
I dare say, the grammar checker is the one thing that keeps me on MS Office. Fixing my stupid wording wording mistakes as i type along is incredibly valuable. Spell check is great, but I really want the grammar checker also.
It's so transparent in Word (And it works in Outlook 2003 now) that most people barely even notice it, and would really start to miss it when it is gone.
My experience: OO need less support. (Score:5, Informative)
"maybe has a little less support"
When you have "26,000 desktops", commercial support is not a factor, because you have your own support staff. Also, my experience with Open Office is that the help messages are better and there are fewer serious quirks than Microsoft Word 2000. (I've never tried Office XP because I decided to get off the Microsoft time waste train.)
I'm guessing governments have not adopted Open Office sooner because most government officials did not have enough technical knowledge to feel confident in committing thousands of desktops to something that didn't come from Microsoft. It is "you can't get fired for choosing Microsoft, even if the software doesn't work well".
When someone chooses a software package, they are choosing business partners, because so much staff time is invested in becoming comfortable with software and in using it. Officials are beginning to think about this: Is is sensible to want to be the business partner of a company that has been so adversarial toward its customers, and which produces software of amazingly bad quality [secunia.com]?
If you test Open Office, be sure you test the latest version, 1.1.4 [openoffice.org]. Version 2.0 will be available in April or May [openoffice.org] of this year.
Generally, when you send documents outside your company or organization, it is better to send PDF files. That guards against accidental changes. To make PDF files in Open Office, just click the PDF icon in the toolbar. To do this in Microsoft Word, install additional software.
Re:Heh (Score:3, Informative)
That's actually the reason we didn't use OO at my previous job. It wasn't so much a problem adopting it internally, but we communicated with outside people as well. (This was two years ago, though. Not sure if it's still true today.)
TCO could actually matter in the case of "I spent too much time trying to make this work with another person."
Re:And a fine tactic it is. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, InfoPath is pretty neat (of course it only comes with the Enterprise Edition and it requires a great deal of development work and piles of auxilary server software before it does anything actually useful).
You should take a look at some of the cool stuff being done with Zope and Plone before you assume that I have handed you such a loaded shotgun. SharePoint, InfoPath and all of the other new MS Office technologies are cool, but they are more along the lines of development tools than part of the MS Office suite. Either way, you can bet that the city of L.A. isn't using any of these tools, and the only way that they can afford them is to spend money that they currently are hoping to spend on police officers.