Migrating a school district to OpenOffice

Pete Poggione is an IT director for a school district. The school district just switched last year and is still in the process of working out some kinks. Pete took a big risk switching to open source, presenting it in the first year of his job in the school district. He's still firmly in favor of open source and anti-vendor-lockin, but he's learning a lot about what happens when you extract yourself from the Microsoft universe.

When Pete Poggione started his job as IT director of the school district two years ago, he admits, "There were a lot of 'opportunities'." Read 'opportunities' as problems. He found a school district containing 1,100 Windows computers with licenses that needed to be updated in the near future. Updating the licenses on schedule was going to run the district serious money. He also needed to replace many of the computers, some of them Pentium 3s with 64MB of RAM running on Windows 98. With a lot of money going for new computers, he had even less money to spend on software licenses.

He found quite a bit of diversity in the office suite software being used; diversity for an IT director is a bad thing. Some users had WordPerfect, some had Microsoft Works and others had Microsoft Word. This, of course, meant that the IT staff had to support all three applications. These were just three of over two hundred applications that the staff had to support. (Pete has already reduced that number significantly, and is working toward reducing it to fifty.)

The combination of money and application overload made OpenOffice.org look like a great choice. Another reason for choosing OpenOffice.org was that schools often use different operating systems for different classes. Many users ran Windows, but classes teaching graphic design or broadcasting used Macs. He wanted an application that could run on all operating systems and could transition easily to Linux, if he was able to switch the school district over in the future.

Poggione put together a proposal and gave it to the school district administration. He also gave it to the technical advisory group he had formed, comprised of administrators from various grade levels. The proposal was well-received, and in the fall of 2006, they switched to OpenOffice.org.

Poggione brought in a training company that partners with Novell. They provided instructor-led and video training. He also had a thirty-seat staffed computer lab open over the summer, available to all staff and teachers in the morning. However, only twenty people came in for help with learning the software.

Poggione made a point of providing incentives and information about OpenOffice.org. He included tips and tricks in the technology newsletter, even providing small prizes to the first five people to respond saying that they have read the tips. He based the tips on the questions they received at the help desk. If he starts noticing that they are getting a lot of requests about numbering or mail merges, then he puts information on those in the technology newsletter.

One major issue is that many of the teaching materials, including Earth Science and English, are created specifically for use with Microsoft Office. There are screen shots and directions for performing a particular task, like charting the results of an experiment in Excel.

Poggione also encountered technical issues converting WordPerfect documents containing graphics; they just didn't come over well.

Approximately eight months into the transition, Poggione and the school district are still in the bumpy transition process. It's not going as well as he had hoped. There are various platform and technical concerns. One big problem had to do with mail merges and Java. When using the latest version of the JRE with OpenOffice.org 2.0, a mail merge with more than 50 records would lock up and crash. These problems were only on Windows. He worked out the problem, though and since then mail merges have worked correctly.

As with the users working for the city government, Poggione has a lot of users who tell him "I used to do it this way in Word, and I can't in OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org doesn't work." He can nearly always show the users how to do it in OpenOffice.org, but there's a lot of frustration and resistance. Teachers have a lot of extra work at the best of times, and learning a new office suite wasn't at the top of their list of priorities.

Another issue is that, since WordPerfect and Microsoft Word have been around for so long, there was always an expert around on campus to ask. Now, there is only the help desk until the expertise develops again. Also, Poggione finds that users don't ask all their questions, and he only finds out about problems with figuring out how to do something by rumor or when the issue reaches a boiling point.

Students vary in their attitudes. Juniors and seniors dislike having to switch, since they're used to Microsoft Office, but the younger students have little difficulty using it.

One huge advantage that he presented in his proposal was that students would be able to use OpenOffice.org both at school and at home, for free. Yet, he's finding that there is a surprisingly low rate of use at home, because people don't trust anything that's not Microsoft. The parents are forbidding their children to install OpenOffice.org on their home computers. He hopes that this will change as more people hear of OpenOffice.org from other channels, and as students and parents see it used at school. (Note: I am writing this in OpenOffice.org, on a Vista laptop, on which Microsoft Office is also installed. No problems.)

Replacing Publisher is often a challenge, not only because its file formats don't convert to any other format, but because its features don't easily map to either OpenOffice.org Writer or Draw. However, Poggione gave his advanced Publisher user Scribus, and she loves it. She warns him frequently that he had better not try to take Scribus away from her.

They also found it an issue for users that OpenOffice.org Impress can't play a media file continuously over two or more slides. They use Microsoft PhotoStory in these situations instead, which is free.

Poggione acknowledges that he didn't anticipate the amount of support they would need to provide for OpenOffice.org, especially during the transition period. He and his team decided that they will support OpenOffice.org using the same help-ticket process they provide for other computer issues. They hope that this will encourage people to ask the questions they need to, and get the questions through the system solved faster.

He does find that the lack of easily-available support for OpenOffice.org, less than for a commercial product, is a disadvantage.

If he knew then what he knows now, Poggione says, he would do more support upfront. He would visit teachers in their buildings, sit down with them and find out exactly what issues they're having. He would also make a point of focusing on particular tasks and put together straightforward, simple instructions for the tasks.

"It's all just a cultural and educational issue," Poggione sums up. He says that it will take time and getting used to the product.

I had no such luck with MS licensing, and believe me, I tried.

Give me a clean load of 98SE on a PII 400 mhz with 128mb of ram, and I’ll show you a machine that zips through web browsing, and word processing programs, faster than any open source kludge patched to the hilt to “fit into the system”.

You may want to dip your feet a bit into the open source world. I can think of five modern distros off the top of my head that are far superior to Win98, and would run perfectly on the machine you spec'd.

You may want to dip your feet a bit into the open source world. I can think of five modern distros off the top of my head that are far superior to Win98, and would run perfectly on the machine you spec'd.

I can think of about 10 modern distros, that blow the socks off of Win98. Problem is, the minute I load one on a user's computer, I may as well station a technician there, for the next two weeks.

The problem I have with Open Source, as IT, is the knowledge level of the users. Your average novice, is lost, when it comes to OSS... regardless of how "user friendly" the disto might be. It ain't winders.... and I'm not a babysitter.

On top of the fact, that I have anywhere from 100 - 200 new users every year, I've got to consider the help desk side of the equation. The vast majority of 98 problems are known, and documented, and I've got some great "cheat sheets", that allow even a relatively untrained help desk person, to walk someone through something simple, like finding a .pdf file they've downloaded, and lost, or adding a printer, or ....

With something like 20,000 trouble tickets a year, and 5 technicians, I like to have 90% of them resolved in 5 minutes or less, and a single phone call, 10% resolved in a 15 minute visit, and the remaining 10% take up 90% of the available hours. That's impossible to do with open source.

What is a problem, is when you have a few users, engrossed in the glory of open source, sending attachments that can only be opened by themselves...

Once again Microsoft's failure to adhere to any kind of published standard is somehow the fault of open source software.

But you are right about one thing, Office 2007 is wildly different, but for those who just want to type a letter, or create a spreadsheet, it only takes them about 45 minutes, not 45 hrs to figure out the major differences.

Then your users aren't doing anything complex (like, say, mail merges or formatting documents to go of to a commercial printer.) As such, they shouldn't require much training to switch to OO.org and your claim that they would require formal training to use it is groundless.

btw... just purchased 500 copies of 2007 for $28 each as an upgrade. $28 is well worth it, to remain compatible with the other 95% of the world.

That 95% is shrinking rapidly. Many state governments are now requiring documents to be saved in ODF rather than Microsoft's wildly proprietary and randomly changing format. The concept of being able to exchange documents with anyone using anything is starting to catch on elsewhere too. This has been common for read-only documents for a long time and the popularity of PDF shows. Now ODF is becoming the format of choice for those that want read-write capability regardless of what the sender used to create it.

The 2% that are too cheap to purchase value for their money, cause about 75% of my trouble tickets.

It isn't about money. It's about standards. Microsoft has gotten away with their "my way or the highway" attitude for a long time but it seems that's starting to change.

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