Case study: FN manufacturing seeks to deploy the right suite to the right people.With open-source productivity suites getting better and better, the cost of Microsoft Corp.'s Office is looking higher and higher to FN Manufacturing LLC.
Last year, FN Manufacturing began testing OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 with the hope of mitigating the costs associated with an enterprisewide upgrade to Microsoft Office 2003. FN Manufacturing's goal was not necessarily to entirely replace Microsoft's Office suite, but to find and deploy a more cost-effective office solution where and when possible. And for Ed Benincasa, an eWEEK Corporate Partner and vice president of MIS at FN Manufacturing, the more the OpenOffice.org suite matured, the more compelling he found the open-source alternative to be.
"Microsoft Office is a good product, but it's expensive to deploy in circumstances where you have light users," said Benincasa in Columbia, S.C. "We're looking for a mix of office suites to help keep costs under control while meeting the needs of our end users. From a cost standpoint, Microsoft Office everywhere just doesn't make sense for us."
In March 2004, eWEEK Labs worked with FN Manufacturing to gauge the usability and capability of OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 versus that of the then-just-released Office 2003. At the time, FN Manufacturing was using Microsoft Office 97 and Microsoft Office 2000 and was facing a forced upgrade because Microsoft had discontinued distribution of new licenses for those versions.
In addition to comparing OpenOffice.org 1.1.1's and Office 2003's capabilities, the precision machining manufacturer wanted to determine the training issues and costs it would face were it to move users from Office to an open-source alternative. Although tests determined that users would have little problem making the switch, formatting incompatibilities that emerged during the evaluation concerned Benincasa.
Cautious but undeterred, he conducted a deployment cost analysis last November and determined that FN Manufacturing could save as much as $80,000 by forgoing a wholesale upgrade to Office 2003 and Windows XP and deploying OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 on the organization's 225 desktops running Novell Inc.'s SuSE Linux Desktop 9 or 10.
The potential savings were compelling enough for Benincasa to get buy-in from management to begin deployment of OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 in areas of FN Manufacturing where potential incompatibilities would not be an issue. In December, Benincasa and his IT managers deployed OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 on warehouse operations desktops and upgraded shop machines from OpenOffice.org 1.0 to Version 1.1.1. Using these machines, users view construction and operation control sheets but do not create or make changes to documents.
"We've been using OpenOffice.org on the shop floor for about a year now, and we haven't had much difficulty," Benincasa said. "Since these machines are for viewing, compatibility issues haven't really come up."
For a larger-scale deployment of any non-Microsoft productivity suite to office workers, however, Benincasa wants compatibility issues completely resolved. As long as Microsoft formats are used by the majority of business users, the reality is that IT managers must ensure the documents created by their users are compatible with those created by colleagues, business partners and suppliers.
"[The forthcoming] OpenOffice.org 2.0 needs to be really successful in meeting the Office format in order for it to have a chance at the large deployments; otherwise, it'll always be restricted to small, specialized deployments," Benincasa said. "As long as Microsoft is the industry leader, OpenOffice has to work with Word documents."
During eWEEK Labs' testing last year, FN Manufacturing's advanced users ran into issues when trying to maintain formatting in complex Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The final version of OpenOffice.org 2.0 will reportedly resolve the compatibility issues that came up in testing last year, although Benincasa said that in his tests of OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta 1, framing issues and problems with edited graphics in Excel still existed.
Click here to read more about OpenOffice.org 2.0 and other Microsoft Office alternatives.
Compatibility issues would inevitably be solved, said Benincasa, if the forthcoming version of the Microsoft suite, Office '12,' supported the OpenDocument format. However, Microsoft has stated that it has no plans at this time to add support. The software giant did, however, recently announce it would support Adobe Systems Inc.'s PDF.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Firm Deploys OpenOffice--Where It Makes Sense
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