Re: [Sheflug] Can open office help?

[david <david.willington@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> If you get the data out in csv format then you at least have rescued the
> data.  How any open programming effort will help the school at this
> stage is the next question, but I do think it is worth pointing out to
> the powers that be the free software that is out there - with a small
> demo that actually works rather than a demo that does all they need.
> I demonstrated OO this weekend and when people began to realise they
> could save the money spent on an MS Office license and still get the
> same functionality they became *very* interested.  Some of these people
> were able to obtain student licenses of MS software but the prospect of
> not spending over Â100 on software seemed to appeal.
Yes, that all makes sense, but the inertia's fairly massive. I've had  
 success with moodle when there was an unexpected price hike (250% or so) for a VLE that wasn't being used and wouldn't work well even if
 they were using it. I've suggested that surely OO's worth looking at  
 if the savings are going to be of the order of Â15,000, but this in  
 itself isn't enough. This minor crisis (ie staff not being able to  
  access info in the school database) might be enough of an  
 opportunity. The prevailing view around OO is that industry uses
  Word,  so we should, although the industry standard argument doesn't
 run to dumping Publisher! Plus funding is tied to specific products so
 money is available to buy licenses but not available to spend on Open
 Source support.

All the best

David
> 
> 
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