OpenOffice.org Migrations: Easing Medium-Large Companies’ Migrations

The market opportunity for OpenOffice.org Migrations topic took over after turning OpenOffice.org migrations into a business post, with a variety of views and perspectives.

Savio Rodrigues points out that top 2000 companies will likely end up closing a deal with Microsoft, but out of that niche he sees a business opportunity for ISVs, System Integrators and also Microsoft’s partners. Leif Lodahal, project coordinator in the Danish OpenOffice.org project, sees Sun’s absence from the Danish market as an opportunity.

The most important barriers to OpenOffice.org adoption by medium to large enterprises are the lack of system management tools, the scarce availability of enterprise applications’ integration, and the burden associated with the migration of custom applications.

System Management.

Systems management solution for OpenOffice.org are supplied only by third parties, since Sun dismissed its Java Desktop Configuration Manager and APOC seems poorly supported by Sun. Medium to large companies do need similar tools to deploy OpenOffice.org on a large scale and/or in a multi-sites environment.

Enterprise Application Integration.

ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications are not integrated with OpenOffice.org yet. IT vendors tend to integrate with third parties applications when those applications get adopted by the early majority. Microsoft built its Office System partnerships network in years, and Sun should just do the same. Communities can help gathering public attention on missing integrations, since IT vendors especially big ones are sensitive to what people say. All in all partnership programs drain resources

Custom applications.

A variety of different small integrations maybe needed to fully fulfill customers’ needs, ranging from migrating simple Access applications to the integration of custom applications importing or exporting spreadsheets. I have been reading reports talking about average migration time per document, but customers need predictable results.

It is time to move from artisanship to industrial.

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