YHGfL - Making the most of your broadband
The true story of moving office
Tuesday 26th October 2004 [PC Pro]
If you're afraid of switching from the safety of Microsoft Office, we reveal how two businesses fared in the real world
There was a saying: nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. You could probably say the same about Microsoft these days. Windows and Microsoft Office have established themselves as the de facto twinset for business use, and it takes both courage and a very persuasive argument to switch to anything else.
For home users it's a simple choice. OpenOffice is free, stable and, on the whole, compatible with what your friends will be using. But a business must look beyond the headline price and consider a total cost of ownership over the three or five years it will be before it next considers an upgrade.
Over that time it's going to swap a lot of documents with the outside world and if each one needs to be translated in some way, costs will rocket. Likewise, if the software is flakey, or it costs a lot to maintain, sticking to the Microsoft solution - and in particular Software Assurance - may well be cheaper in the long run.
It's fortunate, then, that the driving force behind our Labs Winner, OpenOffice, is Sun, a company that has built its reputation in the workplace with two decades' worth of network software and the hardware on which it runs.
Sun sells the commercial StarOffice, currently at version seven, which is built on the same codebase as OpenOffice. It's no surprise, then, that it has already attracted a considerable corporate fan-base.
Central Scotland Police switched to StarOffice last year and saved £245,000 in a stroke. 'Our mission is to fight crime,' said Jim Jarvie, IT Manager for Central Scotland. 'By allowing us to devote as much of our funding as possible to keeping policemen on the street, the StarOffice suite is helping us in IT to do our part in fulfilling that mission.'
It was Microsoft's switch to a three-year rental model that made him and his team start to look elsewhere and, in 2000, after several years of using Sun's server technology, he downloaded a copy of StarOffice so he could try it out. He was impressed by what he saw.
'Our experienced Microsoft Office users found the StarOffice suite easy to learn and easy to use,' he explained. 'The operational differences between the packages are quite minor. We also tested StarOffice's compatibility with Microsoft Office and found that almost all files can be transferred between them with no problems.'
The force has now rolled out StarOffice across 400 desktops, which in turn are shared by more than 1,000 users. Without the imperative to upgrade that some see as the only way to make the most of Software Assurance, it was able to standardise on one desktop installation that, once its users got familiar with, would serve the force for several years to come. Jarvie therefore sees his £245,000 cost savings as only the beginning.
But savings weren't the only consideration. Where the police are concerned, choosing software that hampers rather than helps a force's operational effectiveness could put lives at risk.
In practice, though, Central Scotland found that several features unique to StarOffice actually served its users better than the equivalents in Microsoft Office; indexes and tables of contents being a case in point.
Elsewhere in the suite, the equation editor simplified life for traffic officers. This complex mathematical tool allowed them to more easily consider treadmarks and roadside obstacles when investigating traffic accidents.
It isn't just the public services that have seen the benefit of making the switch to StarOffice, though. In December of last year, Sun used its annual conference in Berlin to announce that high-street photo outlet Jessops was rolling out StarOffice across each of its stores as part of a revamped enterprise management system, expected to deliver total cost savings of £2 million.