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On 30/12/2021 21:31, Ravi Dwivedi wrote:
On 30/12/21 8:06 pm, James Harking wrote:

Currently to replace the totality of Microsoft Office 365 takes around 5 or 6 applications I suspect which is a difficult ask given that you can

Can you please tell what challenges does a company have in such a migration?

a) How many changes in the current workflow process will have to be made?
a 1: How do those changes increase productivity?
a 2: How do those changes decrease productivity?

b) What custom software has to be written, so that the various components of the workflow process play nicely with each other?

c) How much training will need to be done, so that employees don't complain about things.

Maybe I am missing something.

Why is it hard for a company to migrate, I mean?

It isn't uncommon for mission critical functionality to be dependent upon an unmaintained, undocumented excel spreadsheet. Determining what the inputs, outputs, and different functions of that spreadsheet are, can be an extremely labour intensive, error prone undertaking. I'm aware of one organization that stayed with MS-DOS 6.0 + WFWG until Win 7 was released --- it took that long to convert the mission-critical spreadsheets to something that worked, played nicely with the new software, and was fully documented. Another organization migrated from MS-DOS 3.1 to Android Gingerbread & Windows 7, simply because that was their most affordable migration path - it cost them US$10,000 rather than the US$1,000,000 quote that they received for a MS-DOS 3.1 to Win95 migration.)

My last mail didn't consider the challenges a company can have but individuals won't.

SOHO (1 - 5 employees) are the hardest to migrate, because they don't have the budget to upgrade everything. One SOHO dropped the migration, because it couldn't afford to pay for the required email functionality that their non-FLOSS vendor provided, but wasn't available in any FLOSS product.

>Does it boil down to company not sharing our concerns of freedom?

For organizations, being able to theoretically sue somebody, because their software doesn't meet legal requirements, is more important than the Four Freedoms. By way of example, Apache Open Office, BharatOffice, EuroOffice, LibreOffice, OpenOffice.Org, Oxygen Office, RedOffice,do not offer either official, or semi-official certificates of compliance with (US) Section 508 criteria.

Only one of the a11y trainers of computer software I've come across, considered adding to their skill set, and after a couple of hours, concluded that it wouldn't be cost-effective for him to learn OOo well enough to train others in using it. His replacement has flatly stated that FLOSS and a11y are mutually exclusive.

> If they don't think freedom is important, why will they switch to LibreOffice?

Several organizations that migrated to LibreOffice, stated that the primary reason was to minimize attack points by the Five Eyes.

I'm aware of one organization that viewed the multilingual functionality as a checkpoint that MSO lacked. Specifically, if the L1 speakers of a minority language wanted the UI in that language, the worst case scenario was that the employees do the translation. Best case is that somebody else has done the translation, and provided a rule set for grammar checking in that language.


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