On Wednesday 04 December 2002 02:32 pm, Brian wrote:
> I need some examples so I can present a strong case for OpenOffice. 
> We're stuck netween a rock and a hard place, and OpenOffice might save
> us.  That is, if I can get the PHBs to listen.  Whenever I say "linux",
> they say "no", before they've even heard what I have to say.  They
> assume that free == crap.
>
> I had been thinking about raising the issue with PHBs, but I feared a
> solid "no" when I said the word "open".  Then this morning, someone in
> our department comes up to me and asks me if I've ever heard of
> OpenOffice.  Her husband uses it religiously, and supposedly he's heard
> of governements and huge businesses switching to it like mad.
>
> So, what I need are examples.  Who here uses OpenOffice in a corporate
> environment?  Who thinks OpenOffice is a worthless piece of crap?  I
> need to hear both sides so I can present a clear case in all directions.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Brian
>

We are giving all the new users here OpenOffice.  No more purchases of MS 
Office.  No complaints so far, it does everything they need.  They are 
Win98/W2K machines.  Granted, that is only about 3-4 users so far, but it 
will grow.  We do have a few users that will need to stay on MS Office 
because of VB based macros that they have written.  If I didn't already 
have the licenses, I would migrate all the rest over to it right now.  

I hand out OpenOffice CDs to people for home use when they want a 
recommendation for an Office Suite/Word Processor.  The feedback from them 
has been good.  It has saved them $$ and more than meets their needs.

I use it on my Linux box and on my vmware Win sessions.  I dont have MS 
Office on my machines at all, at work or home.  I even convinced my son 
(18 yrs old) to use it on his Win32 box, and he likes it.

The only drawbacks I have found are importing | delimited files (unloads 
from Informix).  OO wants to put them in Writer, not Calc.  But, that is 
what Gnumeric is for, or sed...  And, it won't read WordPerfect files very 
well, but AbiWord does, and I'm the only person here that ever used 
WordPerfect, so that is not a real problem.  

It does still load too slow, but on Win32 they have some of it already in 
memory (it shows up in the system tray), which helps some.  It's much 
faster than StarOffice 5.2 used to be :)
-- 
Thanks,

James Spinti
jspinti at dartdist dot com
952-368-3278 ext 396
fax 952-368-3255