Office 2003 vs. OpenOffice.Org - ' Sum of their parts ' (
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In any case, all testers liked Office 2003 and said staying with Office would likely provide the smoothest upgrade path. "Itll be easier to introduce Microsoft Office 2003 to users here at FN Manufacturing than OpenOffice because its a lot more user-friendly than OpenOffice," said Joan Curfman, business systems supervisor at FN Manufacturing. "Training will definitely be more detailed and will take a lot longer on OpenOffice.org because the interface isnt that friendly. Users here have problems using what we already have. Theyll probably find OpenOffice.org even more difficult to use and learn."
Benincasa said training on OpenOffice.org would be conducted in-house, leveraging the OpenOffice.org knowledge developed within the organization through this eVal and FN Manufacturings previous tests of the suite.
A move to OpenOffice.org could be just the beginning of FN Manufacturings open-source journey. Benincasa has been pondering a move from Windows to Linux for some of the companys desktop systems, a path the multiplatform OpenOffice.org would help clear.
Sum of Their Parts
We tested the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications in OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 and Office 2003 separately, but some of the testers assessments applied suitewide.
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Open-source eValuation
eWEEK Labs tips for testing the viability of open-source applications in your own organization
Identify where open source can be successful While many users
may not be ready for open-source productivity applications, chances
are such apps could be effectively used on manufacturing plant floors,
in warehouses and in retail locations; identify several potential
scenarios for open source within your enterprise
Compare attributes of the open-source alternatives with your
needs Consider an applications functionality, cost, market share,
support and maintenance issues, reliability, performance, usability,
and security
Develop a pilot program Give a user test group the opportunity
to experiment with the new application at work and even at home;
ask users to record their thoughts on training, compatibility and
support issues
Build a core of knowledgeable users IT managers with user advocates
will have an easier time persuading their organizations to make
the move to something new; these users also will be able to help
lower training costs at organizations that choose to conduct training
in-house
Develop a training program Determine whether users will be trained
in-house and how much time will be necessary for users to perform
daily functions while training without productivity loss (or, at
least, without significant productivity loss); keep in mind that
some applications will take longer to learn than others
Source: eWEEK reporting |
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Almost every person who tested Office 2003 expressed appreciation for Offices Task Pane—an interface feature that lets users carry out operations related to the document at hand, such as using the thesaurus while working on a Word document. Testers also said they valued Task Pane as an interface to Offices help system, which they found to be effective.
As for OpenOffice.org, most testers said they liked being able to launch any of the suites document types from the application they were using. Testers also said they appreciated having all their OpenOffice.org application instances available from the Window tool bar menu item. The Window item in Offices apps, in contrast, shows only open instances of like applications.
Word vs. Writer
All the eVAL testers said they create and work with Word documents every day.
The testers who worked with Office 2003 said there were few differences between Word 2003 and earlier versions of the Microsoft word processor. In a comment echoed by many of our testers, Rick Miller, an engineer at FN Manufacturing, said, "Most tasks I perform are the same or similar [whether in Word 97 or 2000 or in Word 2003]."
Thats not to say that there werent issues: One tester, for example, complained that a key combination had changed and that Microsofts context-sensitive smart-tags feature got in the way during testing. By and large, however, users were agreed that their familiarity with Word would minimize the time required to get up to speed with Office 2003.
However, the testers who worked with OpenOffice.org said the suites word processor application, Writer, seemed familiar as well.
FN Manufacturing Validation Engineer Doug Shaffer said that Writers "layout and command locations are similar to Microsoft Words" and that it was "very easy to perform the standard basic tasks in Writer."
Brownings Sanzone, who tested OpenOffice.org in addition to Office 2003, said that documents took longer to open in Writer than they did in Word. This can be attributed to the fact that Writer must carry out an import operation when it opens documents saved in Microsofts Word format. For short documents, theres no noticeable difference, but for large files with complex formatting, Writer can take as much as 10 seconds longer than Word to open the same document.
In general, though, of the OpenOffice.org applications we evaluated, Writer presented the fewest file-format-compatibility problems.
Several testers said they were impressed with the ability of Writer to save documents as PDF files, a feature they believe would save money as well as time because PDF export for Word requires a Microsoft add-in that must be purchased separately.
Next page: Suite considerations
Enterprise Applications 
