Can OpenOffice replace MS Office?

We are starting to do some project and application roadmapping, and am thinking about OpenOffice (and StarOffice) as a replacement for OfficeXP and Office 2000, which is on the bulk of our PCs.

• Roughly 120 users and PCs
• OE Windows XP Pro on virtually all desktops.
• Office 2000, Office XP, properly licensed (knock on wood).
• No Software Assurance
• Windows Server 2003 and Active Directory
• MS Exchange 2003 - not sure yet about Exchange 2008
• Outlook 2003 on top of lower Office installs
• "newish" but aging PC inventory .. very little change in the last 12 months.
• Windows SharePoint Server for the intranet .. it's use is growing

How much should I consider the Open Source alternatives?

What sort of things should I be concerned about?

What hidden issues and second-order consequences should I be aware of?

I am looking forward to hearing pros and cons, and any other comments.

Every year or two, I install OpenOffice and the problem is the same - documents don't format/translate quite right to/from their MS Office counterparts.

It doesn't seem to be overly wacko-paranoid to observe that Microsoft is good at stamping out competition. All they need to do is tweak things just a bit in each service pack & patch to make sure things don't translate quite right, and they continue to lock me in, because I don't have the resources to handle the additional support requests.

I think this is surmountable if:

• your users are extremely flexible
• most documents leave your office in a different format (say, PDF)
• you don't do a lot of document sharing outside the organization

Otherwise, I'd say the business disruption is more costly than the licenses (unfortunately).

The short

OpenOffice doesn't play nicely with SharePoint, Exchange, or Group Policy. Since these are integral parts of your environment, why introduce something that will make your life more difficult?

The Long

A few OpenOffice pros:

• Free. I assume this is why you're looking at it in the first place.
• Opens/saves as pretty much any file format out there.
• Cross-platform (doesn't matter for your intranet, but possibly interaction outside?)

A few OpenOffice cons:

• File format compatibility is not 100%
• Painfully slow
• Clunky, unintuitive UI
• No VBScript
• Excel gurus will blow up your car for making them use Calc (ditto for Access/Base)
• Default save format is .od*. Most of your users won't change this, so bring on the confusion!

There's also a lot of little things in MS Office that has made it the definitive Office Suite, like Word's fantastic templating/styling system and the slick Document Map and Outline views.

Assuming OpenOffice's feature set meets your needs, it comes down to price. Extra administration, transitionary training, dealing with users upset over losing features (through ignorance or technical disparity), extra hassle in exchanging documents, extra support cost incurred by using a non industry standard, etc. If your user base is flexible and your support system is ready to handle it (think Higher Ed), OpenOffice is probably a viable alternative.

In the situation you describe, I'd stick with MS Office. While the cost of switching will depend on how your organization values time, you're going to continue paying in small ways as long as you use OpenOffice.

On a purely personal note, I've used OpenOffice and MS Office personally and professionally. I can't stand OpenOffice for all the reasons I listed above. Microsoft's merit notwithstanding, MS Office is the industry standard because it's that damn good.

Switching to OpenOffice:

Pros:

• Free licensing
• File compatibility with many formats

Cons:

• Will need to train users on using new UI
• Hope you don't use any applications with Word/Excel plugins
• User Backlash (I see this with any kind of change like this)
• You will begin to receive calls because other companies won't be able to read ODF files
• Files 'don't quite look right' - Compatibility with Word is all over the map
• Harder to administer via GPO

Call me a pessimist, but I would stick with Office right now if it is in the budget. If you are looking to slash some costs, you could switch over to OO but support is going to be a headache for you and your IT staff.

If you're using SharePoint, I would say stay with MS Office. OO.org is a good office suite, but you're already at a high integration level with Microsoft products, and switching is going to be a big hassle at this point.

We just upgraded about half of our users to OpenOffice. We've found that OO is a fantastic substitute for users who:

• Do not use any Office automation (i.e. VBA scripts)
• Do not run Powerpoint
• Do not need formatting to be perfect (particularly headers/footers)
• Do not use Access
• Do not integrate with other apps (Salesforce, Web Exports, Sharepoint, etc)

For those who switched, we gave them Thunderbird with Lightning, and they love it (more than Outlook, although we weren't using Exchange). It would be hard to convert an entire company, but I'd suspect that in almost any company certain positions don't need the whole Office suite.