Slashdot | OpenOffice 2.0 vs. MS Office Review

Slashdot | OpenOffice 2.0 vs. MS Office Review: "I mean, naturally, the reason to upgrade to Office 2003 is because it is better... so sure, say my employer has 200 users x $300 per upgrade license, that's $60,000.
Of course I can explain in my budget how when we upgraded 3 years ago to XP, assume again for the same reason... 'it was better...' that it in 2000 it was just a temporary $60,000 expense, leading up to and preparing us for this EVEN better version in 2003.
OH, but wait, I forgot, just 2 years prior to that we spend maybe $50,000 to upgrade to the 2000 version from the '97 version. And two years prior to that we spent maybe $40,000 upgrading from '95 to '97.

In case you don't have Excel handy, that's...

$40,000 in '97, $50,000 in 2000, $60,000 in 2001/2, $60,000 in 2003 equaling $210,000 in 6 years just on licenses...

THEN there was the amount of time and labor necessary for my IT department to upgrade each of these 200 computers...

And the training time, to make the most of each new version, and teach my company's employees how to work together in the 'even better' way that Microsoft has so carefully designed for us.

Plus the memory, and computer upgrades necessary to run the newer versions...

AND with 2003, to MAKE THE MOST OF IT, we needed to add a new server to run SHAREPOINT Server for our 200 people.

Yes, that is what Microsoft and Mr. 'Who uses Office XP anymore?'' would have you do.

Fortunately, up until but not including the last sentence, my upgrade story is fiction. We're still using Office 2000. A few are using Office XP. Some of us even use the old Wordperfect and Quattro suite from Corel. And when the Engineering department told us they wanted 2003, I told them NO. (Unless of course they can tell me what features from 2003 it is that they NEED. And I gave them a link to Microsoft's webpage showing the differences between 2003 and XP.)

Now when time permits, we're going to find out just what features our company REALLY needs, and the suite that provides those features best, will be what we will convert the whole company to.
If that is Office 2006, (which of course will be EVEN BETTER, so you ought to go get it NOW if you can!), then so be it, but until then this IT Department is trying the OpenOffice 2.0 beta, and thus far, except for 'Convert Text To Columns' in Excel, there has been no need for Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice 2.0 beta works great, has most of the USED features of MS Office, and removes most of the need having Acrobat (full version).

We've already switched most people from IE to Firefox, which most everyone had no problem with, they hated IE's 'many' popups and like Firefox's tabs. AND we have MUCH less Virus/Spyware problems now.

And as Outlook keeps chewing up people's PST files, they are being moved to Thunderbird.

Hmm... before you know it, I may be able to CHOOSE which OS we're going to run too..."