Strategic Innovations, Inc.

Strategic Innovations has been recommending OpenOffice.org as an excellent alternative to other office suites, especially Microsoft Office. Many benefits can be realized by making the switch to OpenOffice.org, including:

• cost - not only is the cost of OpenOffice.org - free - a great benefit, but organizations can also avoid costs related to license management. If you buy "packs" of licenses for an application like Microsoft Office, making a switch can also help you avoid tying up resources in spare (excess) licenses.
• training - As Microsoft Office 2007 starts to make inroads into the market, you may be faced with training issues. First is the cost of retraining your employees to use their office suite, which can be avoided by using OpenOffice.org which sports a familiar interface. Also, if your organization transitions to Microsoft Office 2007, you will incur a reduction in productivity while employees learn the new software and then deal with the inevitable errors.
• document formats - by using OpenOffice.org, organizations can benefit from using an ISO approved document file format. This increases the number of options available to use the documents (many other programs can open OpenDocument Format documents, the default for OpenOffice.org). For organizations with long-term archival responsibilities, this may be an issue as well as the OpenDocument format is publicly available, ensuring documents can be accessed long after today's software is relegated to history.
• "togetherness" - as noted in the article, our personal experience with OpenOffice.org is that it is much better at sharing information between the different component parts (e.g. pasting spreadsheet information into a text document). This is based in the suite's roots as noted in the article and it shows in real life usage.