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On Fri, 23 Sep 2011, Rob Beard wrote:
On 23/09/11 18:38, paul sutton wrote:I hate to say it but realistically if they're so tied in with MS Office they might save much when factoring in things like training and converting macros etc.Just seen on westcountry news about budget cuts and that there will be a related public consultation could people keep an eye out for details perhaps post here, so people can respond. I know we are up against it, but it's worth a try and there are links to successful adoptions of open source ( I am NOT talking about Linux desktops here) just adopting OSS where it could save money. Lets at least try and keep trying and not be silent, otherwise someone will suggest job cuts and it could be YOUR department and YOUR job they suggest for the axe.
Yup - Training is the big thing - it's as much effort to move from XP to Win7 as it would be to move to Linux - or should be, bu see below... There is a lot of intertia there as well as "I've been using Win for 10+ years now, why should I change" type of stuff. (Which I preach for Linux!)
I had people whinging at me yesterday because I wanted to (no, really!) give them a new laptop with win7 on it when they previously had XP...
Maybe when they were looking to upgrade (say from XP to Windows 7, or Office 2003 maybe to 2010 etc) then there could possibly be a saving.
In the long-term yes, in the short-term it's 2 lots of training - one to re-train the trainers how to use it, so that they can subsequently train the users... After that hurdle then it becomes easier - or as easy as upgrading from one Win version to another is. Or should be. I'm now starting to think that some Linux distros are becoming even more complicated than Win7 - not that I like Win7, but having been exposed to it recently, I can see how people like it and get on with it. (and curse at it too!)
What's intersting to me, recently, is the effort to move just one person from XP to Linux (my wife). She's fairly clever though and can now use OpenOffice writer and calc as easy as she could use Office before - she's even getting to grips with Scribus too - but one thing that was an issue recently was printing documents - she was exporting to PDF to email to people, but when she printed them locally, some letters were missing! It turns out to be an issue with "Document Viewer", whatever that is - I think it's a Gnome thing... I suggested she print directly from OpenOffice - which worked fine - then installed XPDF for her, and that printed them fine too. I then wasted 10 miutes trying to work out how to make xpdf the default PDF viewer, but found out that it was a viewer thing in the GUI filemanager rather than some system thing - ah well. So it's a learning process for lots of things, all the time...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq