We deployed it across the company on a trial basis and it caused some problems with those who don't like change and a few who used MS Office features that OpenOffice cannot do. Personally, I persisted with it and found it works well enough for occasional use. The key is remembering to save all documents in Microsoft formats.
So, how many people actually use all the features of MS Office? - Desktop publishing? Pivot tables? 150 different fonts? How many personal users or people in your organization can write an Access database? At work, I write maybe three or four Word documents in a day and alter or write an Excel workbook maybe twice a week. Like the majority of people these days, one suspects, I communicate mostly by e-mail and most frequently use the Office applications to read e-mail attachments. You can download free readers from the Microsoft site for this. (Get them quick, before MS takes them down) I use Powerpoint occasionally and Access almost never - I always have to refer to the manual while working with that.
In the end only having those who actually need these features - mostly in Finance, Sales & Marketing and Public Relations - using licence paid copies of MS Office and everyone else either on OpenOffice (or for many, even just the Word and Excel readers) would save us around 760,000 dollars a year on licence fees. Savings that could have a positive effect on many of the staff's annual bonus payment - an awfully big incentive to change.
