K12 Open Technologies

I’ve been doing OpenOffice.org and StarOffice training and consulting for six years. I’ve seen a lot of transitions, and, well, they didn’t all run smoothly. You can’t make them all smooth. Change is often annoying and upsetting. The big picture of saving hundreds of thousands of dollars and the principles of open source don’t seem to matter as much to the soldiers on the ground who at 7 PM are wondering why that text box is overlapping their graphic when it looked fine in Word.

You can’t make a perfect transition that everyone loves. But you
can do a lot that will make it better. And while the details vary,
here are the five major components I’ve seen time after time that
will help, or possibly make or break, your transition to
OpenOffice.org or StarOffice.

1. A good pilot

I don’t usually quote Dick Cheney, but his much-mocked statement
about “unknown unknowns” in Iraq applies to any big software
transition, and definitely OpenOffice.org. You’ll need a pilot
program before you even decide to switch.

The pilot needs many things, including the following:

• At least two stages, starting with a few power users who can
  discover and fix as many issues as possible, then a broader more
  representative group to dig up as many “unknown unknowns” as
  possible.

• Comparison to Microsoft Office 2007. Ask some users in the
  pilot to use Microsoft Office 2007 evaluation copies, and some to
  use OpenOffice.org. Don’t skip this. The choice isn’t between
  using the old Office for the rest of their lives versus switching to
  OpenOffice.org. The choice is switching to something new and free,
  or sooner or later something new and very much not free.

• Dedicated resources to convert documents, figure out
  solutions, and evaluate the results. Consider using students with
  office assistant work for this; junior high or high school students
  with some exposure to Microsoft Office and a little training can do
  a lot of work. Talk to the intern coordinators at your local
  colleges.

• As part of the approach to the school board and other
  decision makers, assemble a list of all the programs that you’ve
  had to cut, whether due to budgets, No Child Left Behind, or
  anything else. Put Microsoft Office on that list. (Not “having an
  office suite” but specifically having Microsoft Office). See if
  you can get them to justify that giving teachers and staff is more
  important than the music program or the soccer program. See how many
  programs you can get for the cost of what you’re spending on
  Microsoft Office.

Here’s what you need to get from your pilot:

• Solutions to all issues, well documented so that you can be
  sure that you fix the issues before you install the software for a
  broader group of users. Some of the solutions might be that the task
  can’t be done that way and that that’s all right.

• A good sense of how many documents actually need to be
  converted, how many can just be re-created, how many of the
  documents to be converted need extra work done on them; and how much
  time the conversion will take.

• Inventive ways to address issues: keeping a couple licenses
  of Excel or Access; investigating other open source programs such as
  bulletpoint.com; investigating online programs like Google Docs; and
  replacing complex macro-driven business processes written years ago
  in Access or Excel with off-the-shelf low-priced or open-source
  solutions.

• A complete list of the settings under Tools > Options and
  Tools > AutoCorrect that you will change before you install
  OpenOffice.org for the public. Nearly everything under Tools >
  AutoCorrect, Options tab, for instance, should be turned off, and
  turning on Regular Expressions and Suppress Printing of Blank Pages
  under Tools > Options will prevent a lot of problems. Also, don’t
  forget to set the file associations correctly so that
  double-clicking a Word file or an OpenOffice.org file will bring up
  OpenOffice.org. (Though ideally, you will remove Microsoft Office if
  you want people to use OpenOffice.org.)

• A bunch of big meetings afterwards to evaluate how it
  actually went, with all decisionmakers and stakeholders, to prevent
  people from impeding the progress of the decision once it’s been
  made.

• An understanding of the actual level of computer competence
  among users. The results might surprise you. The results will help
  you determine how much training you would need to switch to
  OpenOffice.org and to switch to Microsoft Office 2007.

• An understanding that switching will not be free. Do a
  realistic evaluation of how much training, documentation, support,
  document conversion work, etc. you will need to pay for. Get the
  cost of switching to and using OpenOffice.org for the next 10 years,
  and compare that to the cost of switching to Microsoft Office 2007
  and using it for the next 10 years. Don’t forget to include time
  and/or training for people to learn Office 2007.

2. Support from the top

If you make a thoughtful, considered decision to move to
Openoffice.org, you need backup. The people who have the authority
need to be 100% behind the switch, and need to know that it will
cause much resistance in the first year or so. They need to be tough
and committed. They need to be ready to state in no uncertain terms,
that this happening. It’s their job to talk to the union
representatives, to talk to principals or teachers resisting the
change, and they’ll have to do it a lot, firmly, and get really
tired of it before the transition starts really taking hold.

You, in turn, need to make expectations clear so they know that
they’ll need to do all this.

Another thing the Powers That Be need to decide is how the saved
money will be spent. If you can find a way to hire more
paraeducators to help out teachers, or provide more educational
opportunities, that can help with the transition.

3. Tough love: distinguishing between needs and nice-to-haves

This is related to the pilot and to support from the top, but it’s
so important that I split it out. There will be a vocal minority, and
a less vocal majority, who really don’t want to switch. Issues will
include:

• “I don’t like how my charts look in OpenOffice.org”

• “Mail merges are hard”

• “I used to be able to just insert the new column; now I
  have to create a new empty column and paste it”

• “My documents don’t open right in OpenOffice.org”

• “There’s no grammar checker in OpenOffice.org”

If teachers and staff can’t do their jobs with OpenOffice.org,
it’s one thing. If they prefer to do it the way they’re used to
or that involves an extra couple seconds, or learning and following a
new procedure, or doing an extra step when they open a Word document
the first time, then that’s where the tough love comes in. Your
school psychologist, the best-loved principal, an influential
teacher, or perhaps just the scariest member of the school board,
needs to be ready to tell them in whatever way is appropriate that
the issues they raise are not significant enough to reverse a
decision saving the school district hundreds of thousands of dollars
over the next decade.

4. Proactive support and training

Many people have only used Microsoft Office. Many people have very
basic computer skills. Many people have a tendency to not try very
hard to learn something new that they didn’t want to learn in the
first place. All of these factors and more mean that your IT support
team needs to not just hand out posters and pens with phone numbers
and web sites for support; it means they all need to be out there
circulating every day, especially during the pilot and the first
several months of transition, asking how it’s going. If you don’t,
then you will hear second-hand after a few weeks that something just
doesn’t work and people hate the new software. You will investigate
the problem and 9 times out of 10 find out that it is an easily
solved problem, sometimes with a setting that involves absolutely no
effort from the user. But by then the problem has done its damage and
you’ve got people frustrated, regardless of whether they should be.

How do you have enough people to rove around all those schools?
Good question. It’s time to be inventive. Get students with free
class time to at least rove around and collect information about the
problems; some of them will get to the point where they can help out
themselves. Work out a deal that if the transition happens, that part
of the money saved will go toward hiring a part-time IT person.

You absolutely have to give people training before they
have to start using OpenOffice.org. It doesn’t have to be complex;
start with an hour presentation and a handout of the top 10 tasks
you’ve come across that cause problems for people, in the pilot.
Expand from that. Give them quick-reference cards; you can buy these
and you can have your tech people or early adopters make them. Have a
contest for best tips. However you choose to do it, make sure that
you show you’re not just throwing users in the deep end. And you
will often find that people’s skill level rises because they didn’t
get that much training ever in Microsoft Office, and now after
training they know about Ctrl V and Ctrl Z, know how to reference
cells instead of repeating information between spreadsheets, know how
to add page numbers to handouts, etc.

5. Templates, clip art, and fonts

Templates and clip art aren’t part of the software, technically,
but that’s the thing people miss the most, and talk about the most,
after a switch.

Templates – This depends on the terms of your Microsoft
Office license, so check that out. But remember that nearly any
document in Microsoft Office can open in OpenOffice.org. If you’ve
got MS templates, you’ve got OOo templates. Just run them through
the template converter (File > Wizards > Document Converter)
and you’re ready to go. You can also download MS Office and
Openoffice.org templates for free from many sites.

In addition, you’ll want to create some templates so that users
don’t have to do some of the more complex features. Creating a
document that has no page number on the first page is a common task
and more complex in OOo than it needs to be. So just create a bunch
of templates and put them out there, with of course a
can’t-be-ignored set of instructions on how to get to them.

Clip art – This
will again involve some sixth-grade volunteer with free time, or an
intern or just a motivated open-source member of the PTA. You can
download free clip art very easily, and categorize it in different
directories by type. If you are switching over an entire school
district, make sure that you are not duplicating effort; just have
one person doing it, or one team doing it together. If you know of
another school district switching over, talk to them about their
downloaded clip art. Then just add it to the Gallery for every user.
This will prevent the otherwise inevitable complaints and delight
users if you can make a nice collection of art.

Fonts – There’s nothing mysterious about fonts in
OpenOffice.org; it just uses whatever is on the machine or user
profile. But you’ll want to add fonts to coordinate with the
introduction of OpenOffice.org because people love fonts and the
positive feeling toward the fonts will generalize to OpenOffice.org.
1001freefonts.com has some great stuff, but google for free fonts and
you will find all you need before you get tired of looking.

It sounds like a lot of work.

It is. Switching to an entirely different piece of software is a
big deal. The interface is similar and the price is free, so it seems
at an unconscious level like it ought to be just a matter of
installing new software. It won’t be. But if you want to save a
huge amount of money; if you want to use software that everyone can
install at home for free; if you think that saving the soccer program
or the music program is important; then it’s worth it.

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Solveig Haugland has worked as an instructor, course developer, author and technical writer in the high-tech industry for 17 years, for employers including Microsoft Great Plains, Sun Microsystems, and BEA. Solveig is now the owner of GetOpenOffice.org,
a StarOffice and OpenOffice.org consulting and training organization providing transition consulting, instructor-led and remote training, and training materials to schools, city and county governments, and private companies. She is also co-author, with Floyd Jones, of three books: Staroffice 5.2 Companion, Staroffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion and OpenOffice.Org 1.0 Resource Kit, published by Prentice Hall PTR. Her fourth book, the OpenOffice.org 2.0 Guidebook, is available from Amazon.com, from Cafepress, and directly from Solveig . For tips on working in OpenOffice.org or StarOffice, visit Solveig's blog: http://openoffice.blogs.com. To contact Solveig about training or consulting, email info@getopenoffice.org, or for more information see her business web site, http://www.getopenoffice.org.