I received an email request from Adrian Walden from Morris Fuller Walden Williams, asking whether they could use Open Office on computers that did not use bespoke MS Word driven applications. The simple answer is yes, but a couple of things to watch out for, and here is a copy of the email for everyone with permission from Adrian.

"These are rather easy to implement, where you don’t have dedicated applications that are dependent on Microsoft Word etc.

1. Open Office 3, is 98% compatible with Word, even up to Word 2007. I say 98% because when you get complex tables, graphics and generally formatting within footers and headers, you have alignment issues with Open Office. But this only becomes a problem, if you get a document, want to change it and save it back for somebody else to further edit it. In general, you can read docs easily, and save them in Word format without a glitch. Use Open Office where Word is not dictated by apps.
2. Email, I use Microsoft Outlook, only because I need to advise the 95% of the legal market as they use Outlook. It is the best email system around, BUT…. For a year I used Ximian Evolution – it is the closest to Outlook in it’s capabilities. But you could use Outlook Express (no calendar, and limited in a couple of other areas), Thunderbird is also a good solution. There are others, Thunderbird is developed by Mozilla, the same people you develop Firefox.
3. Lightning by Mozilla is a good calendar. Integrates well with Thunderbird.
4. Open Office has Calc, which is the spreadsheet equivalent to Excel – probably a closer match than OO Write and MS Word. You also get a Presentation and database with Open Office3.

To watch out for:

1. Make sure that if you are using MS Exchange Server for your email and calendar, that your choice can support Exchange – I know Ximian Evolution did, not sure about the others.
2. You will have people kicking against the change, maybe by an online overview course on the internet to help. But to be honest I found Open Office rather easy to use.
3. Be careful of moving emails, calendars and contacts across, there often are a few hoops to jump through to get it to import into the new system, once the first is done the rest are very quick and simple.

You could launch onto the Google Apps, a good number of people are, Gmail is being used a lot, and you can have an enterprise account, where the features are close to what you might get with Exchange as the back-end server. But it is online. They have email, calendar, word processor and spreadsheet – but to be honest they are not yet where the desktop apps are in complexities. Collaboration they obviously are great as the docs are all only already.

I would give it a try, the only cost would be labour costs to get a technician to make the changes. If it does not work, chuck money and Microsoft at it again."

Comments to this thread would be great from other people who have tried any other application.