When adding up all costs for IT equipment, software and any other related technology that your new business might need, you’ll probably factor in some sort of office suite. This generally consists of a Word Processor, Spreadsheet, a Drawing application and perhaps a Database.
Indeed, all of these products are vital to any organisation, but the costs can cause headaches, especially for startups.
Paying hundreds of pounds per PC might seem like something you should try to avoid, but simply can’t.
Or can you?
There is now, and has been for quite some time, an alternative to expensive proprietary office software. OpenOffice.org (or just OpenOffice as it’s usually called) is an office suite, much like Microsoft Office, and includes all of the things you’ll need. The best part is the cost. It’s all free.
At this point you may be thinking there’s got to be some kind of catch, you get what you pay for and free must mean it’s really bad. Actually it’s not. Like most Open Source software, big corporations such as use it in all sorts of places, as do many governments including those in Birmingham, Berlin, Prague, Bristol, Munich and many more.
But what makes OpenOffice so great that the big players want to use it?
Firstly, there’s a Word Processor called Writer, which is fully compatible with Microsoft Office (it recently included support for the new .docx file types that Microsoft Office 2007 uses) This means all of your existing documents will work in OpenOffice, and anything you create in it will open in Microsoft Office. Because OpenOffice adherers to international standards for document formats, it has great compatibility and is platform independent, meaning you can run it on your Windows PCs, Linux PCs, Apple Macs, and other platforms too.
The only exception to the compatibility rule is where proprietary features of Microsoft Office, such as ‘ActiveX’ or some other Microsoft owned technology has been used.
Because this breaks international standards, in these rare cases, OpenOffice may struggle to work with these types of documents.
However, it is becoming common for many organisations to follow standards and not use vendor specific features. In many countries, this is now a legal requirement so that citizens can access public information without prejudice.
This issue is unlikely to affect your business, especially if you are going to create most of your documents from scratch.
Another advantage of OpenOffice is it’s ability to have extra features added on top. Instead of paying to do basic tasks as you would do with some packages, OpenOffice allows you to do so much more, without cost.
One great feature, which is often overlooked, but will no doubt prove invaluable is the ability to create PDF’s from your documents. Some companies charge high fees for plugins that will allow Microsoft Office to create PDF’s, OpenOffice includes such functionality out of the box. These PDFs can be protected so that no one can copy them, great if you need to send samples or proofs to a client.
Other parts of the suite include the excellent OpenOffice Calc, which is the equivalent of Excel. This allows you all of the functionality of Excel, including charts and graphs. The user interface is very similar, and getting your head around using Calc should be relatively straightforward. Calc can open most Excel spreadsheets, and offers most of the functionality that Excel does. Again, as with Writer, some documents may not appear as they should in all cases.
Another great tool included with OpenOffice is Impress, the equivalent to PowerPoint. It fully compatible, and only very rarely has compatibility issues. Impress is very much like PowerPoint in what it can do, and the way the interface looks. It has the advantage that, like the rest of the OpenOffice suite, it can easily be extended into anything you want through the use of plugins. There is also a massive gallery of slide templates, clip art and other assets that can be used in your presentations.
The best advice that we can give to startups: try OpenOffice. If it serves your needs, and many users find that it really does, then you’ve just saved several hundred pounds. If not, other alternatives do exist, such as Google Docs, something which we focus on in another article.
All of this can be installed in one package, and the beauty of it is that you can install it on as many PC’s as you like, so it will scale with your company. You also own the software, rather than rent it in the case of Microsoft Office, which means you can modify it, redistribute and do as you please.
While this may be overkill for small companies, as you grow and your needs evolve, this freedom will prove to be truly invaluable.
Source:
This article was provided by Open Future Ltd
http://www.open-future.co.uk
I personally tend to favour SSuite Office’s free office suites. Their software also don’t need to run on Java or .NET, like so many open source office suites, so it makes their software very small and efficient.
http://www.ssuitesoft.com
I have never used SSuite Office so cannot comment upon it.
I am always weary of pointing people to software that I am not aware of - you do not know what nasty things it may contain inside. But, that is not to say that it is inherently bad.
So I should mention a few things I tend to do before I just go ahead and download, install and run software from the net.
== Download via a reputable channel as opposed to directly from publishers sites ==
Download.com, for example, tend to be a highly reputable download source and run more virus tests on potential software than i have time to do myself
e.g. visit
http://download.cnet.com and search for:
* “OpenOffice.org”
or
* “SSuite Office”
== Check Vulnerability Databases ==
secunia.com is a place where security experts share information about vulnerabilities in software. It is handy to check these kinds of databases against the software (and version) that you are running to keep up to date with any issues as they arise.
Bear in mind that:
When comparing software, the “total number of vulnerabilities” is not a metric that necessarily translates directly to “how secure the software is”. For example, the “number of vulnerabilities that are fixed promptly” may indicate a better software project than one that has fewer vulnerabilities listed.
Naturally, the ‘version name’ of the software is important. Good software publishers tend to fix vulnerabilities in later versions of the software. So, its less of a worry if you are running version 5 of some software and you read about a vulnerability that was discovered in, say, version 3, then fixed in version 4. As version 5 is later than 4, you can be pretty certain that ‘the fix’ was inherited by that later version.
Here are some example searches:
* http://secunia.com/advisories/search/?search=OpenOffice
* http://secunia.com/advisories/search/?search=SSuite+Office
* http://secunia.com/advisories/search/?search=Microsoft+Office
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Just thought i’d mention it.
OpenOffice integrates everything that it needs, in the case of Java, the installer will take care of anything extra required. .NET is not required for OpenOffice, and although Java has it’s critics, the fact that it allows cross platform compatible software to be authored very easily means it’s a technology chosen by programmers of software such as OpenOffice.
Looking through the website that was linked to for SSuite, it seems that the software is only available for Windows. As far as I can tell, it’s also closed source, which puts it at another disadvantage.
At the end of the day, OpenOffice isn’t perfect, but it runs (mostly) perfectly on all major platforms, conforms to International Standards for document formats and is Open Source.