Re: Open Source Office

Welcome to the club! The state of (IIRC) Massachusetts is forcing every
government department to convert to OpenOffice. OpenOffice has made it as a
suite with 2.0. Most people won't have a problem moving to OpenOffice. It
still opens Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. I would highly recommend checking
them out. There is a few others like ThinkFree, but in general other
companies etc seem to be moving to OpenOffice. I do suggest, though, to
donate to them every year to help them with costs. If you donate 1% of what
you spent on M$, that will greatly help.

As far as Linux, there was an article in (I think) PC World on the best
business Linux distro. Ubuntu I believe won. Personally, I don't think you
will initially save much with training costs and learning the new systems.
My personal opinion is Linux for servers and Windows or OS X for desktops.
The iSeries would fit great into this.

Software to check out:
OpenOffice (http://openoffice.org)
Firefox (http://firefox.com)
Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntulinux.org/) (
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Ubuntu:_Best_Linux_Desktop_for_Business_)

On 12/2/05, Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I've used Open Office for several years on a Windows XP machine.  My needs
> are limited.  It works and I am pleased enough with it to write this post.
> Sometimes the conversions to Word are limited, but everything else is ok.
> The German heritage still shows up sometimes though.
>
> I have no experience with it from a network point of view.
>
> ---------------------------------
> Booth Martin
> http://www.martinvt.com
> ---------------------------------
> -------Original Message-------
>
> From: Graap, Ken
> Date: 12/02/05 16:00:26
> To: Midrange
> Subject: Open Source Office
>
> Hi all ...
>
> Our company is looking to significantly decrease our operating expenses as
> we move into 2006.
>
> One thing we currently do is spend a lot of money licensing and supporting
> an M$ Office server/desktop environment..
>
> I'm trying find information relating to a successful replacement of a
> large
> Microsoft Office infrastructure with an Open Source office solution. Maybe
> one that runs on Linux in an iSeries (????) or Linux on an xSeries along
> with PC based clients or maybe even Linux based clients! Wow, wouldn't
> that
> be interesting, no Windows desktops or servers or M$ software... Yikes,
> will
> I be struck by lighting for even thinking such a thought?
>
> Anyway... I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who might want to
> share
> a success story that I could then share with my CIO in order to prove that
> something like this is actually a possibility.
>
> Kenneth
>
> ****************************************
> Kenneth E. Graap
> IBM Certified Specialist
> AS/400e Professional System Administrator
> NW Natural (Gas Services)
> keg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Phone: 503-226-4211 x5537
> FAX:    603-849-0591
> ****************************************
>
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