Search the web for " Study on the: Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU " see <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf">http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/doc/2006-11-20-flossimpact.pdf</a> They have done their homework: " Another crucial perspective of this study is the focus on the use of tools for office automation. Many of the known studies refer mainly to operating systems and often to back office migration. In our study we mainly monitored largely distributed software used on clients as the office suites. Thus, we were able to really test the impact of the new technology on non-expert end-users. More than 6000 PCs were migrated to OpenOffice.org. A comparative use of two Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org suites has been performed after a period of training to reach to same knowledge of the previous office solution. " ... " For the new open solution savings have been computed by predicting on the initial first year of ownership and historical data - as the five-year period of ownership for FLOSS software has not been reached yet. All organizations report significant initial savings due to the zero cost of licenses. In the long term the profit is not that obvious: SGV, BH, Extremadura, TO predict to gain with the new solution. SK predicted equal costs for the new and the old solution whereas PP reports of higher costs with the new open solution in the long terms (see the section on the Province of Pisa). We also investigated the productivity of the employees in using Microsoft office and OpenOffice.org. Office suites are widely used and are a good test bed and representative for a comparison on issues like effort and time spent in the daily routine of work. Delays in the task deliveries may have a bigger impact than costs on the organization's management. Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org. The results of this time-use analysis has show that no statistically significant variation in productivity measured in number of document processed per day and average effort per document has been found over a period of 32 weeks between two randomised groups of users, one to whom OpenOffice was introduced, and one that kept using Microsoft Office. This is perhaps surprising, since users were not previously familiar with OpenOffice. Indeed, the group of users was also asked whether as a result of the experimentation they thought they could do with OpenOffice the same amount of work they could do with Microsoft Office. As shown in Figure 46, under 10% of respondents thought they could not, more than 20% thought they definitely could perform as well with OpenOffice, while almost 60% thought they could be as productive with OpenOffice (as confirmed by the time-use analysis) though with some problems. Given their previous lack of experience with OpenOffice the fact that problems were subjectively perceived is unsurprising, but the fact that objectively the productivity of users remained the same and did not reduce is important. " I have used that as good evidence that OOO is suitable for education. In particular, students benefit by having a somewhat simpler office suite. It makes learning/master faster and easier. In education, we often use .PDF for distributing curriculum, reports and so on because it is cross-platform. That OOO can produce PDF is one of its best selling points, IMHO. If the boss tells you that Office needs to be used because users are "familiar", show him the cursed ribbon of '2007 ... I do not know anyone who is familiar with the older product that likes that change. On Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:22:10 -0700 "Alan Hodson" <<a href="mailto:aahodson@episd.org">aahodson@episd.org</a>> wrote: "Having just heard at the highest level in my district that Open Office is "culturally unacceptable here" (border district of 63,000 students) I am wondering if there is someone in our community of users/believers that has come across data/studies that I could use disprove the MS ethos - I know than in Texas, both PlanoISD and SanAntonioISD are huge open source supporters, but I don't know if that has translated there, or anywhere else, into a document that we can hold up as a banner. Any ideas?" -- Robert Pogson Have server, will travel...