[libreoffice-marketing] Roll-out, retraining, perceptions Re: [libreoffice-users] Do You Share ODF Documents With MS Office Users?

Hi :)  
Is LO really free?  

Roll-out costs.  
One advantage of LTS (=Long Term Support) or the slow plodding pace of MS (with many years between 
releases) is that roll-out costs and the time involved is only incurred every few years, rather 
than every month or so.  Are there ever likely to be any plans to address this?  

Perceptions and re-training
People still seem to think that LO is going to be difficult for people to learn how to use despite 
it's similarity to MS Office 2003 menus.  Somehow people/managers still seem to think that 
upgrading from one version of MSO to another or from Xp to Win7 or Win8 is going to be trivially 
easy.  After all it's all still MS right?  and MS is easy right?  (Wrong on both counts but that 
often still seems to be the perception).  


The marketing teams and individuals such as the chap in Greece are doing a great job of changing 
people's perceptions but it's a constant "up hill" struggle.  The more we can get LO out there and 
being seen and talked about the more the perception can be turned around.  Firefox managed it but 
awareness about LO seems to have grown faster, perhaps partly due to being able to point to FF as a 
similar project but mostly just because of the hard work put in by people here.  

I keep hearing that  the biggest blockers are to do with stability and roll-out costs, and lack of 
an LTS but we have no control over those things.  

We hear stories of this&that organisation that has realised about potential savings on licensing 
fees which is great but we are setting-up a scenario when in a couple of years those same 
organisations switch back to MSO, due to the blockers, and become highly vocal about it.  

Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Wed, 8/8/12, Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Jay Lozier <jslozier@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Do You Share ODF Documents With MS Office Users?
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Date: Wednesday, 8 August, 2012, 3:26

On 08/07/2012 08:24 PM, rob wood wrote:
> > From my experience of working in the IT department of a very large college
> with over 10 000 computers, it has nothing to do with functionality. 99.9%
> of employees use office to type letters and send emails. For the .1% that
> would use advanced features, policy probably disallows them anyway. Plus,
> it is fairly trivial to have different images for those that need/want them.
>
> The reason they don't migrate is because it would create more work for the
> IT department, it is that simple. Plus there is no benefit as far as the IT
> department is concerned. Office 2003 works, and whoever approves the budget
> is just going to accept however much is put in there for it, that is if it
> is actually a separate item and not bundled in with the other microsoft
> licences.
>
> Office = safe.
> LO = risky + more work.

I would second that most users do not use advanced features of any the 
MSO parts. Very few can actually program/write a macro and macro 
execution should normally be turned off for security reasons.

The reasons for not updating MSO version or using another office suite 
(LO, AOO, etc) are roll out costs, roll out time, inertia (no real 
business reason to change), and perceptions about users finding the new 
suite difficult to use.

> On 8 August 2012 00:11, Steve Morris <hidden> wrote:
>
> > Just my 2 cents worth. Businesses with a heavy investment in office can't
> > migrate to LO, as LO is not a functional replacement for office 2002, let
> > alone 2010. A lot of business functionality that is used from day to day
> > and is critical to the organisation in order for their various business
> > units to operate, from say excel, that libreoffice does not provide, even
> > in 3.6, and features that excel allows that Calc disallows (as far as I can
> > see for no good reason). Another reason for not migrating is also the steep
> > learning curve, both with front end functionality and macros, that business
> > cannot afford to undertake due to the loss of time and resources.
> >
> > regards,
> > Steve


Jay Lozier


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