pieterh 1182252446|%e %b %Y, %H:%M %Z|agohover
At the start of the century, in 2000, our offices ran Windows and we used MS-Office for all our word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. When OpenOffice.org became available in 2001, we tried the 638c build, and found that it worked pretty well. A couple of us started using this for whitepapers and internal documents. When a while later, we saw that OpenOffice.org provided a one-click PDF export, we decided this was the way to go. We switched to the OpenOffice.org XML format, and used PDFs for all documents we sent to our clients. We still ran on Windows, but the viruses and trojans were starting to get really annoying. So as we upgraded our workstations, we also switched to Linux. Our office users didn't care - they ran the same OpenOffice.org and Firefox software. When OpenOffice/2.0 was released, with ODF support, we switched to that, and converted our documents to ODF.
We don't pay Windows or MS-Office licenses any more, we don't get viruses or trojans, and over several years of migrating non-technical staff from MS-Word and Excell to OpenOffice, not a single person complained that they could not switch.
For me, the real benefit - apart from saving a lot of money - is knowing that my company's precious documents - contracts, invoices, etc. - are now safe in a format that won't break when some vendor decides to make an arbitrary upgrade, as Microsoft have done so often. We keep these documents for ever. It's just not acceptable to be dependent on specific versions of one firms' software! Also, it's really comforting to know that the chance of sending a virus-infected document to a client is zero. With MS Office documents you just never know.
