Still, it's useful to have some ammunition for the other side, and this report about a migration carried out in Bristol provides that. As the Guardian summarises:
Bristol calculated a five-year total cost of ownership of £670,010 for StarOffice, compared with £1,706,684 for Microsoft Office. This was despite budgeting half as much in implementation and support costs for Microsoft because many users were already on its systems.
The difference may turn out to be even greater, says IT strategy team leader Gavin Beckett. "We discovered that things were simpler than we thought they'd be," he says of the switch. "We always argued that a lot of the risk was perceived risk, rather than real risk."
Update: No TCOs here, happily, but 35,000 users have been moved to OpenOffice.org in Brazil according to this story.
I think this is a great point, in the quote, about "perceived risk." The thing I encounter in training much of the time is that users are afraid of problems they might have. Once they sit down, use the software, see that the B, I, and U icons do exactly what you might expect, and that they can actually do some pretty cool configuration tasks, as well--well, they're a lot happier. Fear of the unknown is often fear of the non-existent. I recommend that anyone considering a switch just try it out. Download it, convert some documents, get some documentation or use the online help, and just see what it would be like, with a small selection of users and documents. And if you encounter big issues, then there's plenty of money saved on the software to deal with them. Hire a contractor to do the conversion if that's the big hump, or keep a few Excel licenses if you need to. There are plenty of solutions to any real problems, and the imaginary ones are even easier to solve. ;>
ReplyDeleteThanks for your input, which I know is based on your deep knowledge in this area.
ReplyDeleteGreat blog, too. Wish I could write practical posts like that.