ubuntu-ngo team mailing list archive

[mhershberger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mark A. Hershberger)]

Alan Bell <alan.bell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> These are interesting points, I don't think he is wrong about any of
> them, however better office integration with proprietary alternatives
> and managing multiple computers are fairly normal pain points for the
> generic Acme Widgets type business.

Agreed, they are. The collaboration aspect is probably most important
for user adoption, though.  If someone at our NGO is collaborating with,
say, USAID to put together a presentation, the application used *cannot*
be a factor.  If we're using OOo and the other person is using MS
Office, someone is going to get frustrated with, say, the way the
appearance changes every time the document is passed back and forth.

> The office suite improvements are really an upstream issue and there are
> events like the ODF plugfest which is going on right now
> http://www.odfworkshop.nl/ but they are things that benefit everyone
> equally, not specially the charitable sector.

Oo! This is good.  However, Microsoft's support for ODF appears to be
the same as that for RTF.  Exporting is nice, but it will never approach
the same level of capability as the native format.

Or am I wrong?  If there is a file format that everyone agrees will be
their primary target, then we can begin to hope for interop.

> Would it be possible to go back to him and ask if there are issues he
> has specifically because of the type of organisation it is, that are
> not being asked for by the rest of the community.

I doubt the issues are NGO specific.  But, as an NGO, we do have to work
closely with our funders (e.g. USAID) in collaborative projects, sharing
documents back and forth.

This was pointed out to me because IntraHealth previously had a more
heterogeneous environment (before my time) of Macs and PCs.  There was
frustration even with collaboration on these two platforms between our
NGO and our funders.

When collaborators run into trouble, one will ask the other to try X,
but they're both using different software, so while X may be the way to
do things in MS Office on Windows, it is called something else or placed
differently in the Office suite on OS X or Ubuntu.

These sorts of irritations are experienced by anyone who has to
collaborate with others outside (or even inside) the organization.  If
these irritations continue to pop up, soon it be clear that life would
just be a lot easier (not to mention more efficient and lest costly in
terms of time wasted) if the Desktop was Windows and the offices suite
was from Microsoft.

Now, a big part of that is training.  As long as our users know more
about the software they're using than their collaborators know about the
software they might be using, we're good.  But, in fact, they have to
understand both the software that they've used as well as the software
of their collaborators for this to be a non-issue.  Good luck getting
that to happen.

Unless you can be assured that the CEO and CIO of the NGO are 100%
dedicated to “standards” based computing, they're likely to just give in
and adopt the de facto standard, which ends up being Windows and Office.

This is simply because the executive is going to be more focused on
getting the job done the quickest way possible.  (And cost for using
Microsoft products is pretty low for NGOs, so the cost argument doesn't
go very far.)

If *I* were the CEO, we'd be all sorts of idealistic about the
software.  But, then, that's probably one of the reasons I'm not the
CEO. ;)

-- 
Mark A. Hershberger
Open Source Developer
IntraHealth International, Inc.
mhershberger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
919.229.9637