Thunderbird and Open Office as alternative to MS Office, Autocad alternatives

iflyforfun

iflyforfun

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iflyforfun
So there are some extremely technology savvy people on this board and I thought I'd reach out and look for some advice / guidance.

I'm in the process of launching a new business overseas. Our software budget is a bit constrained. Looking at the expected expenditure on MS Office, we're talking about a significant amount of cash for which I have other uses. While I'm a power Excel and Word user, I have tried Open Office in the past and found it acceptable if not ideal. While there are many things about Outlook that I DESPISE, it has, at it's core, a decent set of features and good functionality.

So, I sent my IT guy on the hunt to find acceptable open source solutions that are bi-lingual (English and simplified Mandarin). After reviewing everything, it looks like Open Office + Thunderbird with calendar extension may meet our needs. At this point, I'm about to kick him off on an evaluation, but thought I'd reach out to the PoA collective for suggestions, thoughts, recommendations, warnings, etc.

I'd love to hear from anyone with experience here. I know there will be a training curve and we'll need to develop some formal training for the transition, but I'm looking at developing a training curriculum for the MS Office tools now anyway (I'm going to kill the next Manager or Engineer who brings me Word documents with hand typed section numbers, a dozen tabs to position the text where they want it and multiple returns to format the page breaks).

Bonus points for suggestions for an Autocad replacement. We will keep a few licenses for Autocad for the real engineers, but probably 75% of our Autocad users really just need to be able to open, view and maybe measure points on the files.

Double, special bonus points for a Visio replacement. My dislike of Visio can not be overstated, but for some reason I have a handful of people who use it (poorly, I might add) regularly.

[edit] Also note that because of the great Chinese firewall, anything related to Google is completely out of the discussion. Due to the dust-up between Google and the Chinese authorities, Google is very unreliable in China ... most of the time we have access through Google Hong Kong, but several times a day, all Google access is blocked.
 
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LibreOffice is what I've seen more people using recently, it's a fork of Oo_Org . My wife who's a power MS Office user curses a little at LibreOffice at home but doesn't have much trouble getting the job done.

I use Thunderbird + Lightning, works well and I have Outlook installed.

Way back when, I contributed to this project https://live.gnome.org/Dia it might offer some features of Visio, I looked forever a while back to find an application that was file format compatible Visio and it didn't turn up much.

Autocad? Can't help you there, haven't used it since R11 on an SGI/IRIX box.
 
ViewCAD or something similar lets one open and measure things in an autocad file.
 
You must either be looking at a very expensive version of MS Office or have hired a very cheap IT guy.
 
wabower said:
You must either be looking at a very expensive version of MS Office or have hired a very cheap IT guy.
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When you start looking at 400+ licenses for an automotive business with automotive margins, every penny counts and 400+ licenses become a measurable expense item on the budget.

I've worked in fat margin businesses where I didn't twice about MS Office, but in this case it totals up to real money affecting a tight budget. That said, what should a license for MS Office run? I'll be the first to admit my IT guy is pretty weak (hard to find anyone with much depth in this market unless your willing to pay MUCH over average wages, and then you're worried about losing him/her in the next year or two anyway).

This ain't North America ... it is a developing market. Heck, most of my vendors don't even have company e-mails, they use QQ or Yahoo.
 
There are two concerns I'd have:

1. OpenOffice interoperability with MSOffice is not perfect. There are significant formatting differences, and a PPT shown with Impress will be very noticeable.

2. Thunderbird can interact badly with Windows sometimes, particularly if it is paired with Firefox. I'm using IE now because I the latest flash update on Windows 7 seems to have made Firefox lock up with certain keyboard accelerators. It seems to work substantially better on Debian.
 
Microsoft has a bejillion licensing schemes, but bulk licensing is something they definitely know how to do, and discount. If your IT guy is getting list pricing on Office, hand the job to a Purchaser who knows how to call companies and talk to the Sales staff. No one buys Office at list price.
 
NineThreeKilo said:
also look into google docs, its online and free.
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This was going to be my suggestion. However I am not sure if it's free for a 400 seat company.

They have good mail, calendaring, ok office docs, and the best news of all, is it's always backed up. You don't need to buy the file servers, or put a backup system in place for disaster recovery.
 
He stated that Google wasn't an option in China.. Microsoft has many editions. The problems come with deploying and managing 400 installs. You pretty much have to look at Enterprise or Open licensing. With retail or OEM licensing, you will need to manage individual keys and activations for each install. With Open and Enterprise, you can utilize a MAK or KMS server to manage the keys and/or activations. They do have an edition that does not include Outlook that runs about $100 per user. Professional Plus, the most common in a business environment is over $300.
 
A few years ago, I wrote a presentation in powerpoint, updated it with open office, updated it again in powerpoint, and have presented it to a few different groups using powerpoint, OO, and LibreOffice. I, as a casual user of all three, can't find much difference. Saved as powerpoint, there are usually complaints but it has worked well for me.
My electronic logbook was built in MS excel, updated in OO and LibreOffice. Another something that as a casual user, I haven't had an issue with.
As to email, I prefer Thunderbird, if for no other reason than to NOT use another MS product. All I really need it for is email. Though I have the calendar added in, I rarely use it. I have Google synced to my phone and mostly invite myself using that or Lotus Notes (at work).
 
We use WordPerfect Office for all but the email, for which Outlook is still in use (we really only need the Outlook as a "transport layer" for calendar and contact synching of mobile devices, a means of communicating between our contact and docketing system and the mobile world, a role in which Outlook [I grudgingly admit] serves well).

For text documents, WordPerfect is still vastly superior to Word, is still well-supported by Corel, and costs a lot less.

For those occasional items which don't convert well (NB: Microsoft changes document formats regularly to help ensure sales of newer editions of the office suite), LibreOffice works extremely well. I have never, ever, encountered anything that LibreOffice did not interpret and display correctly, including PowerPoint shows. Very impressive software.
 
John221us said:
He stated that Google wasn't an option in China.. Microsoft has many editions. The problems come with deploying and managing 400 installs. You pretty much have to look at Enterprise or Open licensing. With retail or OEM licensing, you will need to manage individual keys and activations for each install. With Open and Enterprise, you can utilize a MAK or KMS server to manage the keys and/or activations. They do have an edition that does not include Outlook that runs about $100 per user. Professional Plus, the most common in a business environment is over $300.
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One thing to be carful of, is Microsoft has a very predatory licensing model.

We all an entire Microsoft shop. And the cost year 1 for our SQL/Sharepoint software was very reasonable. Come year 4, they jacked the price way up on us. They do this, because they know by the time you are that ingrained in there tools, it will cost you far more to move to anything else, so the bump up the price.

Office might be different, being there are alternatives, and migrating to them is not that difficult, but keep that in mind when working with volume licensing.
 
I do use Libre/Open Office at home, but honestly MS Office has an easier user interface, and is easier to deal with when doing things like automatic tables of contents and style formatting. Maybe it's a learning curve thing, I don't know. We still use MS Office at work, but mainly for Outlook. If Open Office had a native Exchange email/calendaring client we would probably toss MS Office altogether.
 
wabower said:
You must either be looking at a very expensive version of MS Office or have hired a very cheap IT guy.
Click to expand...

I just finished a multi year development effort to rewrite an application to run on Linux hundreds of thousands spent to get rid of msft the cost will be recouped in a year.
 
I set up Open Office on a new laptop. When I built a powerpoint presentation on my desktop (using Office) and transferred it to the laptop, I discovered several differences in how OO handles objects on the slides. I eventually bought a copy of Office 2010 for the laptop because it was too irritating having to rework the presentation every time I transferred it to the laptop.

Ron Wanttaja
 
If you don't mind sending documents/presentations to anyone outside your company that will look vastly different in their hands than it does in yours, then Open Office will work for you.

The old adage is absolutely correct: you get what you pay for. You cannot expect a refined product that plays well with others if if you pay nothing for it.
 
Rigged4Flight said:
If you don't mind sending documents/presentations to anyone outside your company that will look vastly different in their hands than it does in yours, then Open Office will work for you.

The old adage is absolutely correct: you get what you pay for. You cannot expect a refined product that plays well with others if if you pay nothing for it.
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Good point on the presentations. For documents, I convert to PDF before sending anyway.
 
Steve Foley said:
Good point on the presentations. For documents, I convert to PDF before sending anyway.
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Careful there, too.

I've had a huge number of problems with the default Mac PDF viewer not being able to handle non-Microsoft (!) fonts. One would think MS wrote that software....
 
Rigged4Flight said:
If you don't mind sending documents/presentations to anyone outside your company that will look vastly different in their hands than it does in yours, then Open Office will work for you.

The old adage is absolutely correct: you get what you pay for. You cannot expect a refined product that plays well with others if if you pay nothing for it.
Click to expand...

Anything from Microsoft is more guilty of not playing well with others than any open source software solution. They went to court to defend their right to not play well with others. What you get is software that is 100% as the mercy of MSFT's shareholders.
 
bartmc said:
Anything from Microsoft is more guilty of not playing well with others than any open source software solution. They went to court to defend their right to not play well with others. What you get is software that is 100% as the mercy of MSFT's shareholders.
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This. MS revels in making changes to document formats which render the newly-created docs unreadable on older versions.

When I do seminars, I use Acrobat anyway - I really don't care for PowerPoint animations and dancing words, so I just create slides and use Acrobat in full-screen mode. Works great.
 
Steve Foley said:
Good point on the presentations. For documents, I convert to PDF before sending anyway.
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Ditto. PDF is the closest I've found to a universal "what I see is what you will see" document format.

MAKG1 said:
Careful there, too.

I've had a huge number of problems with the default Mac PDF viewer not being able to handle non-Microsoft (!) fonts. One would think MS wrote that software....
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I did not know this.

bartmc said:
Anything from Microsoft is more guilty of not playing well with others than any open source software solution. They went to court to defend their right to not play well with others. What you get is software that is 100% as the mercy of MSFT's shareholders.
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True - because MS is the dominant player in desktop office software suites. Much like English, with all of it's own idiosyncrasies, is the official language of aviation.
 
Rigged4Flight said:
If you don't mind sending documents/presentations to anyone outside your company that will look vastly different in their hands than it does in yours, then Open Office will work for you.
Click to expand...

"vastly different" is overstating it, IMO. I use LibreOffice frequently and most times any differences in display are minor, if any. But the point is valid. If you're sending something in an MS format to someone and you want it to look a specific way, make it in MS Office or convert it to something like pdf before sending.

Other than that, I've rarely run into things LibreOffice can't do for me. I find it surprising that more people don't use it.
 
I received a PDF tonight that someone said they digitally signed.

Signature wasn't there, but the date field (typed) next to the signature line was filled in in red. He says, "Are you sure?"

Yeah. Um see, how would I "not be sure" the damn line is blank? LOL.

Then he says he will be interested in what's wrong.

Yeah great... Um... in the meantime, print the document, sign it, and shove it in the nearest copy machine or scanner. That's how I signed it and it took ten seconds at the scanner and a click to attach. Sheesh...

(And I know he has a scanner.)

Sometimes all these broken graphics formats just pizz me off...
 
The company I work for uses Lotus everything. Some things from MS or anything else just do not work right but then, you kind of have to expect that. With the look and feel lawsuits and billion dollar judgements some things just cannot work right least you lose.
The stuff is "mostly" interchangeable and compatible. Settle on what you like but remember the manufacturer reserves the right to completely change it especially if they face yet another Apple patent infringement.
 
\__[Ô]__/;975577 said:
"vastly different" is overstating it, IMO. I use LibreOffice frequently and most times any differences in display are minor, if any. But the point is valid. If you're sending something in an MS format to someone and you want it to look a specific way, make it in MS Office or convert it to something like pdf before sending.

Other than that, I've rarely run into things LibreOffice can't do for me. I find it surprising that more people don't use it.
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The last time I gave any serious effort in using Open Office was a couple of years ago. The alternatives to MS Office might have significantly improved in the last couple of years.

I gave it a serious try, and came away disgusted at the alternatives available at the time.
 
Rigged4Flight said:
The last time I gave any serious effort in using Open Office was a couple of years ago. The alternatives to MS Office might have significantly improved in the last couple of years.

I gave it a serious try, and came away disgusted at the alternatives available at the time.
Click to expand...

I've got an excel spread sheet that I update every day. It contains a complex graph with trend lines. Whenever I try to update it on my netbook with OO, it blows up the graph. I can fix the graph in OO and it will still screw it up.

If all you want is basic word processing and spread sheeting, OO is fine. For anything else, go MSO.

Sent from my Amazon GSF457 Fire using Tapatalk 2
 
\__[Ô]__/;975577 said:
Other than that, I've rarely run into things LibreOffice can't do for me. I find it surprising that more people don't use it.
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Well, I appreciate all the feedback. In the past, I'd given Open Office a try and came away convinced it worked, but not convinced to make the change. That said, at that time my business was using the tools differently. We were a small team in a fat margin business and MUCH of our communication was from our team to our suppliers, distributors and customers. Thus, we weren't looking at a large cost save and second, compatibility was critical.

Now, in a manufacturing environment we have a large potential savings and probably need to keep just a few MS Office licenses in place for compatibility when communicating with customers. Also, the changeover cost is essentially zero since my people have limited skill with MS Office ... we'll be doing training regardless.

I have no previous experience with LibreOffice and after giving it a look, we're going to do an evaluation. We'll also take a look at Thunderbird and Lightning. Thanks for all the input.

Also, I'll have my guys take a look at Autocad Viewer as well as a few others that were suggested.

Still welcome other comments.

Jeff
 
Might also look at Progecad as Autocad alternative. Commands are the same for both, so you can use Autocad tutorials and documentation.

Sent from my Amazon Kindle Fire using Tapatalk 2
 
iflyforfun said:
I have no previous experience with LibreOffice and after giving it a look, we're going to do an evaluation.
Click to expand...

In case no one mentioned it, LibreOffice was derived from OpenOffice about a year or two ago. I don't know the story but i'm sure there was some developer drama involved. Anyway point is, if you've tried openoffice before, then LibreOffice will seem very similar.

There have been many improvement to both over the last couple years. So if there was some missing feature last time that made you decide against it before, it's possible that's been added since last you looked.
 
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