by Eric Ruck, the Director of Software Development for The Velarium Group, LLC.

Given the expense, reliability problems and "death march" licensing issues with Microsoft's Office application suite, it's a wonder that more companies and individuals are not adopting OpenOffice or StarOffice. The reasons for this are primarily awareness and the FUD principal ("fear, uncertainty and doubt").

For the unaware, OpenOffice and StarOffice are competing office application suites from Sun Microsystems, the company behind Java. Both packages include word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing programs, and StarOffice also has a database program as well.

The distinguishing features of these applications are that they are mostly compatible with Microsoft's files, and they are significantly cheaper. OpenOffice is free, and StarOffice costs $80 per user.

Mostly Compatible?

We use OpenOffice at my company, and have encouraged our customers to start pilot programs to test it out. In it's ability to open and edit document created with Microsoft Office, we've found that it works perfectly or nearly so for almost all of the documents we've encountered.

We've seen Word documents with heavy formatting and lots of graphics with some appearance glitches, and some Excel spreadsheets with VBScript wouldn't run the script. But we've received very few document that cause any problems.

Documents created in OpenOffice and opened with Word work very well. So far the only glitch we've observed is with one style of "bullets" within documents, which come out in a different font in Word.

On the other side of the coin, I can't tell you how many times I personally have lost work when Microsoft Office crashed. Occassionally I've also had files get corrupted in Office. In over a year of using OpenOffice, it hasn't crashed on me or corrupted a file once.

In terms of look and feel, OpenOffice is almost identical to Microsoft Office. If you already know how to use the Microsoft products, it won't take long at all to get productive with OpenOffice.

Pilot Project

In this time of tight budgets OpenOffice has a lot to offer businesses of all sizes. If you use Microsoft Office for memos, letters and expense reports, you could be missing out on a great opportunity by not investigating this office suite.

The best way to get beyond the fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with a non-Microsoft choice is to start a pilot project. The price of a few pilot installs is right (free), and you can install OpenOffice on the same machine as Microsoft Office. That way, if it turns out OpenOffice isn't for you, all you have to do is uninstall it.

Start the pilot by doing a little reading. First, check out the OpenOffice website (http://www.openoffice.org), as well as Sun's StarOffice pages (http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/6.0/index.html). You might also want to check out the StarOffice User Group (www.staroffice.com). There's also an excellent book on the shelves, "StarOffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion" by Haugland and Jones, from Prentice Hall. These sources will also provide greater detail about the differences between OpenOffice and StarOffice, so you can better pick which is right for you.

Next, install the program and kick the tires. Open a few files, watch a PowerPoint presentation, and throw together a quick spreadsheet. You'll probably be pretty impressed with how well OpenOffice performs.

Finally, do a limited, test rollout in the office. We recommend selecting one or two of the more technically savvy people for the pilot. They should commit to using OpenOffice long enough to really give it a chance, one to two months at least. Ideally, they should take notes about any issues and solutions that might be particular to your business, so if OpenOffice is adopted, you can create a cheat sheet for the users after the big rollout.

Eric Ruck (eruck@velarium.com) is the Director of Software Development for The Velarium Group, LLC. Velarium specializes in TotalIT services for business customers as well as labor unions and trade associations (www.velarium.com).