What stops organizations from adopting Open Office/Libre Office Office productivity suites?
We all know that there are open source based alternatives to Microsoft Office and the two most popular alternatives are Open Office and Libre Office. But why are enterprise users and even SMB organizations reluctant to fully adopt Open Office / Libre Office? What might be the key pain areas that stops companies from taking a potentially huge cost-cutting step? Let us have a look at some concerns, in this article.
Open Office, as you know is one of the most popular open source based office productivity suites used by several million users worldwide. Libre Office, is a fork of the Open Office project that was started by a group of the initial Open Office developers after Oracle took over Sun Corporation. Libre Office 3.4.2 is the latest stable release of Libre Office and it comes with a lot of feature enhancements. According to Document Foundation, more than 40% of the original Open Office code has been modified in the latest release of Libre Office.
Let us look at some factors (please add more in the comments) that might stop a company from partially or fully migrating to Open Office / Libre Office:
1. Interoperability issues between Open Office/ Libre Office (Open Document Formats) and Microsoft Office proprietary formats.
2. Assumption of lack of enterprise class support from partners.
3. User resistance to change/ User stubbornness/ Lack of sensitivity to standards especially from the top management.
4. Not able to go beyond the pilot stage/ dual adoption (both Oo/Lo and MSo) policy.
5. More features in MS Office.
6. Difficult to collaborate between MS Office and Open/Libre Office applications.
7. Lack of Open/Libre Office suites with partners, customers and other third party ecosystem and the assumption that MS office cannot open / edit open document formats.
8. Don’t want to convert existing MS Office formats to Open Document formats as there is a lot of work, people and time involved.
9. Your favorite software applications do not support open document formats. The ones that support, are not your favorite or you have never considered them.
10. Formatting issues when opening text documents / spread sheets created in one, with another.
11. User training / Lack of willingness to be trained – A general lack of interest in learning new things by users/ employees.
12. Converting existing templates and macros from one format to another.
13. Identifying which applications (Like ERP, CRM) interface with MS office softwares and attempting to make them work with open document formats (Lack of interest/ knowledge).
What else? What’s your genuine reason (read: excuse)? 🙂
Migration to the LO in it present state would require a big bang style of the rollout. And it is rarely an acceptable option in the enterprise. Doing a staged implementation is not an option due to compatibility issues with MSO formats.
Compatibility issues with MSO formats is there – agreed. But do you think Oo/Lo can be implemented in a phased manner? Partially at first and slowly expand it later on?
I find a few glitches in OO that were not present in Word eg use of the Format Paintbrush often results in competely unpredictable effects.
Recent updates now rival Word in the amount of time required before the software will load.
I appreciate it is much easier to blame the final user for a “lack of willingness to be trained”. There! I knew that would catch your attention – even if it was rather too snide a remark 🙂
A document created in Oo may not have problems with the format paintbrush.
Ok, the remark was too direct and not in ‘sugar coated’ words! Sometimes that creates an effect! 🙂
This site inspired me to upgrade OO to v3 so I will now fall in love all over again 🙂
Now I can reformat in sentence case for articles in which the AUTHOR COULD NOT REFRAIN FROM SHOUTING!
I appreciate your analysis of the format paintbrush. Maybe this too will work better in my upgraded version.
Have a nice day!
The people who run the committees and all, refuse to allow users to EMBED all of their own fonts in the OO / LO applications.
That is really bad for archiving, storage, sending, moving to other PC’s etc., etc., etc…
And there is a REAL nazi mindset about REFUSING to configure the software to do what the users want.
This is actually a good write up on the problems associated with the lack of font embedding.
http://tinyurl.com/3oyjeuo