Can you really live without Microsoft Office?

There are many third-party options available for training users on Microsoft Office products. But there are significantly fewer options for training employees in the use of other personal productivity suites. Developing application training courses in-house can be an expensive proposition, though such lessons have the advantage of being able to focus on an organization's particular use patterns and standards.

Many organizations don't feel it necessary to provide training to every employee on Microsoft Word and Excel, since so many employees come into their positions with experience in the software. That same level of prior knowledge can't be assumed for other packages -- with minor exceptions. In the legal field, for example, WordPerfect is still commonly used, and experience in its use is expected.

If training can be dealt with, there remain other issues, some of which involve software used by partners, customers, and suppliers.

The cost of compatibility

In a market filled with file formats standardized through committee action, the most commonly used document format is Microsoft Word's DOC file. Yes, there are common file formats, like RTF, and many Office alternatives can open and save to Office file formats. But saving back into those formats to share with Office users can be imperfect. In a business world that relies increasingly on collaboration, these file format issues can become showstoppers.

The problem worsens when the target shifts from word processors to spreadsheets. Many enterprise business intelligence and resource planning packages use Excel as a desktop front end to their data-gathering functions, and they rely heavily both on Excel's format and its VBA macro programming facilities. For example, while Zoho will import Excel spreadsheet files and allow development of VBA-format macros, the user interface is sufficiently different, and the style-import features sufficiently limited, to make it an imperfect "out of the box" substitute for Microsoft Excel at the corporate level.

The cost of support

Support has been a traditional stumbling block for those wanting to try alternatives to the application mainstream, and to some extent, it remains so with the current set of options. Both Zoho and IBM have partner programs in place to develop a channel for providing product support, and both OpenOffice.org and Google Docs have extensive user forums available to provide peer-based support for issues that arise. None of the suites provides the same level of support that corporations have come to expect with Microsoft Office, but they all have support mechanisms in place.

The support issue becomes more critical when an organization wants to allow flexibility in users' choice of personal productivity software. In these cases, the IT support staff must learn and support a primary productivity suite (usually Microsoft Office) and all the other suites in use. This scenario is the stuff of nightmares for many IT managers, who imagine their staffs constantly learning new applications to support individual users. For these managers, support and compatibility costs can easily combine to make the move to any productivity suite besides Microsoft Office untenable.