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Lessons from successful migrations
LibreOffice's feature set is more than adequate for the everyday needs of the majority of users inside organizations. In general, the few technical obstacles are related to very complex documents, or to spreadsheets using advanced features, or to MS Office macros, which are often difficult to migrate for various reasons.
Users should be able to produce docu-ments using LibreOffice right after the trai-ning: therefore, it is crucial to complete the set up and the test of the workstations be-fore the training begins, as any delay in the installation of LibreOffice will diminish the effect of the training itself. It is also extre-mely important to offer a reference point for any problem connected to the migra-tion, starting from "technology leaders" up to trained support personnel.
The production of the first documents will create a positive perception about the quality of LibreOffice: a smooth process will motivate users to continue and try more advanced features, while stumbling into an issue will leave a negative feeling.
The biggest problem is resistance to chan-ge, which is a side effect of the introduct-ion of a new technology in every large or-ganization. This it seen as a burden in ad-dition to everyday work, and has to be tackled with focused communication. Users have to be persuaded that the new tool can provide a better and more rewarding user experience.
The "brute force" method – which consists in installing LibreOffice and eradicating MS Office without any warning – is the worst of all choices, as it creates a rejection effect which kills any hope of success.
Migration, step-by-step
The deployment of LibreOffice needs to be planned in advance and should be coord-inated with the training schedule, in order to ensure that users will be able to use the software after the first training session.
The deployment method can be selected according to the IT infrastructure. LibreOf-fice can be mass deployed on Windows by tweaking the .MSI package, and creating a Group Policy Object (GPO) to distribute the software package.
Deploying LibreOffice does not mean era-dicating MS Office from each and every PC. The goal is to maximize the number of PCs using LibreOffice, and foster the interop-erability with MS Office by identifying the areas where the latter tries to perpetuate the lock-in.
It will be necessary to educate all users to rely on the ODF document standard to ex-change files both internally and externally, as this is the only way to ensure true inter-operability, and replace proprietary fonts with free fonts to avoid “visual” issues.
The Document Foundation suggests de-ploying LibreOffice in large organizations with the backing of professional support by certified people (a list is available on the website).
Communicating the change
Starting the migration process
Providing training and support
Deploying LibreOffice on PCs
Synopsis of the migration process (there is more in it) to be implemented with the help of certified professionals.