White PaperTransitioning from MS Office to LibreOffice:

a business case

Copyright

This document is Copyright © 2013 by its contributors as listed below. You may distribute it or modify it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), version 3.0 or later.

All trademarks within this guide belong to their legitimate owners.

ContributorsDavid Clinton

FeedbackPlease direct any comments or suggestions about this document to: documentation@global.libreoffice.org.

Publication datePublished 29 October, 2013.

Contents

Copyright..............................................................................................................................2

Contents................................................................................................................................2

Executive Summary.............................................................................................................3

Methodology.........................................................................................................................3

Purchase and license costs................................................................................................3

Productivity and efficiency.................................................................................................4Access to critical features............................................................................................................4

Software availability.....................................................................................................................4

Training costs...............................................................................................................................4

Intuitive interface design..............................................................................................................5

Software support costs.......................................................................................................5

IT costs..................................................................................................................................6

Multiple platforms and file formats....................................................................................6

Document collaboration......................................................................................................7

Executive Summary

The LibreOffice office suite – which includes fully functional programs for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, desktop publishing design, and data management – does pretty much everything that Microsoft's Office will do, but is available for free. But is "free" the same as "no cost," and can your business be as – or even more – productive using it?

So you can make your own intelligent decision whether or not to move your office team to LibreOffice, we examined the key elements required for a serious cost/benefit analysis.

Feature for feature, the two packages probably balance out, overlapping in nearly all critical areas with each excelling in unique areas. Differences in design interface seem largely a matter of taste, but LibreOffice's versatility and ease of configuration make satisfying individual needs much simpler.

MS Office can boast better integrated document collaboration, incrementally quicker (if more expensive) product support and, considering that we are talking about moving an operation from Office to LibreOffice, lower (but not negligible) "transition" costs.

Besides suffering no up-front purchase costs, LibreOffice users will benefit from lower long-term IT costs, greater software stability, unrestricted multi-platform installations, and superior document format compatibility.

Ignoring, for the purposes of this discussion, any special needs an individual case could present, we discovered no significant structural or financial penalty that an enterprise might face by choosing to adopt the LibreOffice suite. Or, in other words, you've got a great deal to gain and verylittle to lose.

Methodology

In business, just about everything can – and often must – be quantified for both its cost and benefits. Analyzing whether you would be better off adopting a new office productivity suite or sticking with what you've already got requires far more than just comparing product price tags: you've got to look at every kind of interaction your team and IT infrastructure will have with this product through its entire life cycle.

Should you move your operation from MS Office over to the free LibreOffice package? The sheer complexity of the business and IT worlds pretty much guarantees that that question has no simple and universally correct answer. But we can provide some of the tools you'll need to help you...

• Estimate both the total cost of ownership and return on investment that you are likely to experience using both packages.

• Break the costs and benefits into logical categories.

• Create illustrative theoretical models.

The rest of this white paper should at least illustrate the way we approach the question.

Purchase and license costs

Cost would seem to be LibreOffice's most obviousadvantage. Simply put, Microsoft charges money forthe use of their product and the LibreOffice Foundationdoesn't.

As the chart that will appear below will show,Microsoft's Office 365 license fees for small and mid-

Purchase and license costs 3

Real-world cost-comparisons:

"The French tax agency claims that upgrading its 80,000 desktops to Office XP would cost €29.5 million, but switching to OpenOffice.org only €200,000." (opeonoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2006/03/openofficeorg_i

.html) "Lower costs with LibreOffice LibreOffice can lower your costs up to 60% over a three-year period compared to other office productivity suites. All this while offering interoperability and world-class support."(suse.com/products/libreoffice/)

sized businesses run between $5.10 and $15.40 per user, per month. That comes to between $61.20 and $184.80 per year. Buying the full Office suite outright from Microsoft will cost between $250 and $519 for a single user.

LibreOffice is, of course, free.

Of course, that's not quite the whole story. Students, educational institutions, non-profits, libraries, and even government institutions can be eligible for discounted pricing from Microsoft, and third party vendors are often able to offer better prices than the official retail. But cost of ownership is nevertheless among LibreOffice's strongest selling points.

Productivity and efficiency

A software package's sticker price is only one way to measure its true cost. Even if a developer offered to pay you to use their product, if poor design and a confusing user interface end up slowing down your team and compromising overall productivity, you haven't gained much from the exercise, have you? We will examine some of the key areas controlling user productivity.

Access to core featuresThere has been quite a lot written comparing MS Office's feature set with that of LibreOffice, the most comprehensive of which is probably a wiki page from the LibreOffice Document Foundation.i The bottom line seems to be that there are individual areas where each package stands out, but taken as a whole, it can't be said that either is clearly superior.

So, for instance, while MS Office can claim better email and calendar integration (Outlook), document collaboration, and the ability to easily import Access databases, and PDF and XML files; LibreOffice 4.x provides smaller (and faster) document sizes, simpler (and cheaper) localization, native connections to MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, incomparable document compatibility, more stable handling of large (250+ page) documents, and the ability to run on many more platforms than Office 2013 – including on Windows XP!

Software availabilityThere's nothing like losing access to your office productivity suite to slow you down. And that, if youhave purchased a recent version of MS Office and then experience a hardware failure (or upgrade), is exactly what you might face.

Until Office 2013, registered users could, a limited number of times, transfer a license to a new computer following a crash as long as it wasn't within ninety days of a previous install. From Office 2013 and on, however, the software is permanently tied to the first machine on which it was installed. For all practical purposes, there are no exceptions.

LibreOffice, obviously, can be installed as often, wherever, and on whichever operating system youlike.

Training costsIntroducing people who have been comfortable doing things one way to something new is always going to be difficult. Moving an office team, whose hard-earned experience has centered around MS Office, towards the LibreOffice suite is bound to be tricky. Some people will need formal training, some macros will need rewriting, and everyone is going need time. In fact, the LibreOffice Document Foundation recently released a white paper that focused on preparing to face just these challenges.ii

But we mustn't forget that any system changes can be expensive. The usability changes associated with Microsoft's product upgrades have long been known for their disruptive scope, and

Productivity and efficiency 4

many software trainers earn a very nice living serving their business customers as they suffer through MS Office package upgrades.

A more complete understanding of the real productivity and training costs required by either transition or upgrade is something that deserves deeper study.

Intuitive interface designA little browsing through online discussion forums will quickly reveal that, one way or the other, people have strong opinions about the user interface associated with their particular office suite. A case in point is the range of passionate reactions to the new hierarchical, tab-based, ribbon menu system first adopted by Microsoft in their Office 2007 release. For some, it was a huge breakthrough in the search for the ideal, most intuitive and efficient interface. For others, it was a confused and confusing mess.

There is no objective way to measure who in this fierce debate is correct, but there is no question that no one system can possibly hope to serve every need. LibreOffice, with its versatility, robust extension libraries and – because its source code is, after all, freely available for any use – openness to personalization, clearly offers the greatest range of options. Or, in other words, if your users don't like it the way it is right now, feel free to change it.

Software support costs

Whether either LibreOffice or MS Office provides a more intuitive, idiot-proof interface is a debate which has been the subject of much heat and precious little light. As such evaluations are, almost by definition, subjective, for the purposes of this paper, we'll simply leave the question unansweredand award the cost-advantage to neither side.

But no matter how well-designed it might be, anyone using software as big and complicated as an office productivity suite is sooner or later bound to run into trouble. Experienced users will usually be able to confidently access built-in and online help resources and push themselves through the impasse. But not all members of your team are so experienced or confident, and the time will surely arrive when they will need external help.

What we want to know, therefore, is how much solving the problem is likely to cost you, and how long it will take. Microsoft includes some product support with its Office 365 license, whose costs and benefits are illustrated below:

License Cost /user/month Text support Phone support Response time

Office 365 Small Business

$5.10 Virtual chat and web/email

24/7 for critical issues

1 hour for critical

Office 365 Small Business Premium

$13.25 Virtual chat and web/email

24/7 for critical and 9-5 for non critical issues

1 hour for criticalNext business day for high-need issues

Office 365 Midsize Business

$15.40 Virtual chat and web/email

24/7 for all issues 1 hour for critical8 hours for high-need issues

More immediate and personal support is also available for both MS Office and LibreOffice from many third party providers.

Free help for users of both packages can also be found through many Internet support forums, where community members donate their time and expertise to anyone troubled enough to ask a question. To get an idea whether there is practical support available for LibreOffice users that's

Software support costs 5

comparable to Microsoft's paid services, we examined two help forums associated with Apache's OpenOffice (an open source package pretty much identical to LibreOffice) which helps LibreOffice users at least as much as OpenOffice's.

Is there some way to measure the quality and speed of support available to LibreOffice users?

While there are many individual volunteers who respond to users' online questions, some are particularly devoted and successful. In order to measure the quality and speed of the support available through these forums, we examined the recent records of two prominent moderators. One, calling himself Hagar Delest and working mostly at forum.openoffice.org, has provided nearly 25,000 posts (and that's besides his activity on www.ubuntuforums.org and who knows where else). The other, known as Floris V, answers mostly through oooforum.org.

For this white paper, we examined the ten most recent threads addressed by each of these two volunteer moderators and measured the time between the initial question being posted and the firstreply (taking the time until the problem was solved into account would involve too many variables to be useful). The twenty cases we did examine seemed to have produced solutions – or at least appropriate redirection towards the place where the answer could be found – about 70% of the time. Bear in mind that some of the threads were less than ten hours old when they were tabulatedand that some of them were opened very late at night or over weekends.

"Name" Total posts % of all posts Average posts/day Average 1st response time

Hagar Delest 24,335 8.93% 11.00 3.3 hours

Floris V 4,690 1.20% 2.04 4.8 hours

These times are averages taken from a rather small sampling. In fact, It wasn't unusual for questions to be dealt with and solved with thirty minutes.

Free product support for LibreOffice, it would therefore seem, is available with an average response time only moderately slower than what is offered through Microsoft's paid service for critical-need issues and significantly faster for high-need issues.

IT costs

What is your office software suite likely to cost you in terms of IT expenses?

Well for one thing, the package with the lighter hardware footprint (i.e., that requires the lowest processing and memory standards) is going to allow you the option of deploying older, cheaper equipment. In this department, LibreOffice, mainly because of its significantly smaller document sizes, is the obvious winner: minimum system requirements for LibreOffice have always been lower than for Office.

And, apparently mostly due to its more stable handling of large documents, LibreOffice is also widely perceived as less prone to catastrophic crashes, meaning that IT techs will be called in for emergency data recovery less frequently.

Here too however, a more systematic study of historical performance data would likely lead to a better understanding.

Multiple platforms and file formats

LibreOffice's built-in versatility must surely count as a huge advantage: if circumstances require that various departments in your company use different operating systems (like Linux, FreeBSD,

Multiple platforms and file formats 6

Windows, or MacOS), you will have no trouble at all moving documents back and forth, since LibreOffice can be installed natively on all of those platforms.

MS Office, on the other hand, will for all practical purposes run only on Windows and MacOS, severely limiting in-house document portability. Not only that, but MS Office 2010 and 2013 can't even open some documents created in earlier versions of MS Office itself, while LibreOffice can handle just about everything!

And even if you should need some missing feature or encounter a serious incompatibility with LibreOffice, if you need it badly enough, you can always have an extension or custom LibreOffice build created from the ground up. Trying that with Office might land you in trouble with some of the world's most aggressive lawyers.

Document collaboration

One area that's of critical interest in the business environment is document collaboration. With clients, contractors, and coworkers often living and working thousands of miles apart, key documents must often be commonly available through the cloud at various stages in their development. Microsoft, through their Sharepoint and Skydrive services, would seem to have had a significant advantage, as their users can fully and securely share all Office documents.

But that's quickly changing. The open source private cloud storage package, ownCloud, recently announced ownCloud Documents to provide seamless document collaboration – either from within LibreOffice (MS Office, for that matter) or your browser.

In fact, there are serviceable collaboration options besides ownCloud:

• Since LibreOffice can save and edit files in many formats, including Microsoft's .DOC or .DOCX, there is no reason why files created in LibreOffice cannot be shared and edited within Microsoft's own Office Web Apps. In fact, Skydrive and Sharepoint will now also allow you to edit Open Document Format (ODF) files.

• Even without Skydrive, LibreOffice users should have no trouble sharing documents with colleagues working on any platform, anywhere in the Internet using desktop file sharing services like Dropbox or Ubuntu One.

• The more robust collaboration made possible through Microsoft's Sharepoint can also be achieved through third-party services like TeamDrive, Alfresco, Unison, or any one of the many enterprise-level ECM vendors.

Document collaboration 7

i See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Officeii See http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/tdf-migrationwhitepaper1.pdf