Best Practices: Implementing OpenOffice.org

A decade ago, OpenOffice.org promised a free and accessible productivity suite to rival Microsoft Office. By enterprise market share standards it's far from the success once envisioned. But for hundreds of millions of individuals, schools, organizations, and others unable or unwilling to shell out money for the Microsoft suite, OpenOffice.org provides a strong basic tool set to accomplish a variety of tasks. Now OpenOffice.org faces more competition than ever, with the rise of new, Web-based tools from Adobe, Google, and Zoho. And while it's got a power trio of Oracle/Sun, IBM Lotus, and Novell providing support and development, OpenOffice.org still lacks collaboration and content management integration common among commercial alternatives. OpenOffice.org adopters remain pragmatic, however. Their shared experiences yield common best practices for successful implementations of OpenOffice.org that others can follow, leading to potentially dramatic cost savings.