I brought this up previously[0] in a discussion where Helsinki didn't go with LibreOffice as they found it would have been $21M Euros more expensive than stayin

I brought this up previously[0] in a discussion where Helsinki didn't go with LibreOffice as they found it would have been $21M Euros more expensive than staying with Microsoft. I'm reproducing my bullet points here as I think the claimed savings in this situation are actually false savings. They supposedly took training into consideration but I think they ignore loss of productivity inherent in the switch as well as compatibility issues. Consider the total costs of all the following: * How will incompatibilities be handled with their existing documents? Is LibreOffice absolutely 100% feature complete identical to Microsoft Office? If not, what proportion of documents use incompatible features? How much effort is required to determine this incompatibility? How much effort is required to redo these documents to fix the incompatibility? How many employees are required to be on such a conversion team and how long will the conversion take? Can the conversion even be done? * How is interaction done with external users who send Office documents? What happens when users outside their office send them Office documents which make use of incompatible features? Will this require maintaining an ongoing conversion team? What is the opportunity cost inherent in the delays in getting documents converted? * How is installation of LibreOffice done? Can it be setup on a centralized WSUS server and automatically deployed to every user as Microsoft Office can, or does it require an army of people manually installing it on thousands of PCs? How are updates for both version upgrades and security patches handled? What is the typical update schedule for LibreOffice (security-related patches, compatibility upgrades, etc.) and will this need to be done manually as well? How many man-hours per year will this take? * LibreOffice doesn't include an email product. What alternate solution would they use? What is the cost to convert all Outlook email and archives to this new solution? Can the new solution make use of all calendaring and other Exchange-related features that Outlook has? Can the new solution be deployed on WSUS and kept up to date automatically, or does this too require an army of people manually installing and doing updates? Can they maintain the security permissions they currently use, such as restricting the ability for users to forward internal communications outside the office? * LibreOffice doesn't have a Visio, Project, or OneNote replacements. What are they going to use for these? How do they convert existing documents and interact with external users who send them Office documents? Is it even possible? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4235508 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4235508