grelmar - 12:26 pm on May 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

I'm actually curious if the crowd here are big consumers of MS Office. Our office is pro-actively dumping it. Sure, Sharepoint and Office have some very slick features, very Rolls Royce.

But when we went around and surveyed how people actually use office productivity software, it became pretty clear that the extra bells and whistles that would justify MS Office over OpenOffice weren't being used. In an office of 40+ people, that's more than $20K Cdn we just don't need to spend.

Our 2003 licenses are still valid, but with the compatibility pain that 2003 has with newer document formats, OpenOffice just works better than Office 2003. So we had to choose, spend the $$ on 2010, or move to OO.

Anyone here know of any good, compelling reasons to stick with MS Office? Technically, we're an MSA reseller (we use the SPLA keys for our downstream clients), so we're anything but "anti-MS". It's just we're having increasing difficulty justifying the costs.

As a side note: Our infrastructure guys are all smiles about this. Aparently, the Management and Marketing types are bugging them less about application crashes since we've moved away from MS Office and Outlook for OO and (an un-named open source email client).