A number of school districts and companies around the country are currently looking at buying the next version of Microsoft Office and a surprising number of school districts are starting to shift towards OpenOffice.org. However, there is not as much traction on the corporate side of the fence. So what does it mean to switch to OpenOffice? To me it’s all about training. OpenOffice is able to do almost everything that Office can do. It’s mature in the 3 release and it’s of course, open source and therefore doesn’t require you to purchase it. However, OpenOffice is a drastic change for some users. Sometimes features are in different places or called different things.
Before performing a mass deployment of OpenOffice to your Mac populace you will also want to consider a number of settings that you’ll likely want to change. For example, while oo.o is the standard default file type for new OpenOffice documents you’ll likely want to use something you can use if you need to exchange data with others, like maybe .doc for Word or .xls for Excel, both supported file formats in OpenOffice (reading files created by others will require no extra work).
The deployment of OpenOffice is fairly straight forward. You simply drop the 380MB app into the /Applications directory of the client system. You’ll also want to bypass registration much as you did with Microsoft Office. This is done by copying the contents of the ~/Library/Application Support/OpenOffice.org/3/user directory. Here you’ll find a registration.xml file and a number of nested subdirectories that include some of your preferences in xml format (or xcu) rather than standard plists. Not that OpenOffice doesn’t use plists, there is org.openoffice.script.plist, but it seems to be parameters for starting the app, such as the last working directory and pixel sizes for screens when the application fires up. So while you will be saving money on licensing, plan on carving out a little budget to figure out all the nooks and crannies for scripting your OpenOffice deployment, which will likely save considerably on support calls down the road.
For Leopard users, Entourage is a bit of a design consideration for some environments. Primarily this is because of mediocre Exchange support in Leopard. For example, for most environments, using iSync to interface with address books and hit-or-miss iCal support for Exchange will be a show stopper. As will using IMAP rather than RPC over HTTP or OWA. If you are an Exchange shop then fully test out the new support for Exchange in 10.6 before you make the decision to go the OpenOffice route and for 10.5 users it’s likely not much of an option…
