I have seen a MSO->OOo->MSO loop in a 2000+ people ICT company. Besides user training on the new UI, the main obstacle to a full removal of MSO was the lockin caused by some applications. I.e they required some MSO DLLs for formatting output documents and printing them. The involved user base was large, and it was economically and technically impossible to rewrite all software. The vendor was not guilty for the lock-in, the company did it itself.
In the end, since an Enterprise Agreement was already being paid, keeping 100% MSO was way cheaper than buying the ~1000 individual licenses for users with lock-in applications.
No doubt the lock-in will present itself again in the future, when the DLLs and OS will evolve to a point they will not support anymore legacy APIs.
Myself I am happy with a terminal and, when needed, OOo. :-)
Nice article to read after I've successfully completed a community collaboration project using freely available tools.
A mailing list with more than 1400 members needed a FAQ ("culture" was already set, as well as a large "captured" information base stored in the Yahoo! Group message archive). In order to have "Open access" an online word processing tool requiring no authentication whatsoever was chosen (Google Docs). The document first page set collaboration rules and a 80% complete TOC was compiled ("Define your process early"). Given the previous consensus on each FAQ Q&A there was no need to "Leverage social mechanisms".
Last but not least the result has been released under a creativecommons license.
On my pro life I have never seen a document with so many contributors and reviewers fill up so fast: the plan Todd Barr described does work. ;-)
I have seen a MSO->OOo->MSO loop in a 2000+ people ICT company. Besides user training on the new UI, the main obstacle to a full removal of MSO was the lockin caused by some applications. I.e they required some MSO DLLs for formatting output documents and printing them. The involved user base was large, and it was economically and technically impossible to rewrite all software. The vendor was not guilty for the lock-in, the company did it itself.
In the end, since an Enterprise Agreement was already being paid, keeping 100% MSO was way cheaper than buying the ~1000 individual licenses for users with lock-in applications.
No doubt the lock-in will present itself again in the future, when the DLLs and OS will evolve to a point they will not support anymore legacy APIs.
Myself I am happy with a terminal and, when needed, OOo. :-)