Conversion to Open Source Software: Training

If you are running a business and want to cut costs, one of the easiest and simplest things you can do is switch to open source software. Generally, this involves finding and downloading open source equivalents of any proprietary software you currently use, evaluating that software, and then installing the software and converting document formats to fit that software company wide. This may also require some amount of training employees to use the new software. That is what this article is about, the training.

Let's begin with OpenOffice.org, probably the most popular open source alternative to MS Office. The conversion here is simple. First let me ask a question: Has your company switched to MS Office 2007 yet? If you answered "yes", then training for OpenOffice.org is almost entirely unnecessary.

Earlier today, my mother was complaining about how much more difficult it is to use MS Office 2007 in comparison to earlier versions. People in your company probably make similar complaints, although maybe not in front of you. My solution was to install OpenOffice.org on her computer. No additional training was required, because OpenOffice.org is so similar to earlier versions of MS Office, that anyone who has just switched to MS Office 2007 will be completely willing to work out the few differences just to have something they already know how to use.

If that does not work, open Firefox to Google (I presume your company had the sense to switch to Firefox when the Department of Homeland Security declared MS Internet Explorer a security hazard) and search "OpenOffice.org tutorial". The first item in the results looks pretty good. If you do not like that one, the next few look pretty good as well. The point is that even if most of your employees do not want to read a tutorial, there are plenty out there and if you just have one employee read one or two of them, at least that employee can help out the others if they have issues.

If you are still skeptical, take a look at this link. How did I find this? Simple: I went to amazon.com and I entered "OpenOffice.org" into the search. That link was the first result. If you do not like that author, or how the book looks, there was a list with many other similar books. Even if you take the tutorial route one of these might be handy to have around for reference.

OpenOffice.org is a very popular piece of open source software and as such has a reasonable footprint. By this I mean that OpenOffice.org has managed to get enough attention for people to actually write and publish books detailing how to use it. This is not true of all open source software. One thing you need to learn before switching to open source software is how to find information about that software. In the previous paragraphs, I used two of the most effective methods for finding this information. If you need to learn anything on the internet, one of the most effective ways of finding teaching oriented information is using the keyword "tutorial" in a search. I searched "electronics tutorial" to begin learning basic electrical engineering. I have used "javascript tutorial" to learn javascript. This works with almost anything, but especially with software.

As you may have already figured out, the second most effective way of finding information online is by searching the subject you want to learn about, ie. "OpenOffice.org". In the above case, I wanted to find books related to the subject, so I went to one of the foremost online bookstores and searched. If you have tried it, you have seen the long list of relevant information. While these are probably the fastest and most effective way of finding information about using open source software, there are a few more which should be obvious, but are not always.

I think I am safe saying that all open source software projects have their own web page, in one form or another. Many smaller ones use repositories like sourceforge.net (write this down, this website has a very large number of open source projects, and a simple search will often leave you with many useful results), but each one still has its own pages on the web site. Bigger projects, like OpenOffice.org have full web sites all to themselves. OpenOffice.org's web page can be found at openoffice.org (big surprise?). As a matter of fact, let's go there right now. Notice on the left hand side (or maybe the middle of the page for you) there is a list of options? The top one and the third one down offer support of different types. Near the top of the page, there is a row of tabs; notice how the title of the fourth tab is "support". Click that. If you are familiar with internet forums, you might recognize the format of this page. This is a place where you can ask questions about OpenOffice.org, and people will answer them. The answers do not always appear overnight, but unless they are rediculous or unrelated to OpenOffice.org, they will probably be answered relativly quickly. If you are switching your business to OpenOffice.org and your staff is worried about learning to use it, show them that site. Make sure they know that answers often will not be immediate, but they will eventually come. Many open source software websites actually include tutorials made by the people who made the program. These websites can be invaluable sources of information and should probably be your first stop when looking for learning resources for open source software.

That should cover training for open source software. Try these techniques if you are hesitant about switching to open source software because of training issues. Another good idea is to download the software yourself and play around with it. Many open source applications are relatively self explanitory. I learned to use OpenOffice.org by using it. Your experience with proprietary software may also help you with open source software. I took a MS Office 2007 class and learned how to use OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet program more effectively, because a lot of the information applied directly to how OpenOffice.org operates. Remember though that not everyone learns like I do, or like you do. It is wise to supply your staff with reference materials, so they do not have to keep knocking on your door to ask how to do things that they were not able to figure out on their own.

In parting, I would like to offer some useful links:

Open Disc is a project that has compiled a CD of useful open source software for Windows.
Open Education Disc is a branch of the Open Disc project tailored towards students, especially college students, but contains some software that could be useful within selected business environments.
SourceForge.net was already mentioned in the article, but bears repeating. This website hosts web space for an enourmous number of open source projects. It is more frequently used by smaller projects, but it does host many larger projects as well.
Wikipedia.com has lists of open source software, if you look in the right places. An example is a search for "accounting software". At the bottom of the wikipedia page, in the 'references' section, there are lists of open source, freeware, and 'retail' (or, rather, proprietary) accounting applications. Similar searches for other types of software should yield similar results.

Searching "open source" or "open source software" on modern search engines will also get a long list of open source software sources. Just be careful. Upon searching "open source office" I discovered that there are web sites out there that try to exploit open source software by asking for personal information before allowing you to download it. Most good open source software is freely downloadable. Free as in no strings attached, so if you discover that the first site listed for the above search asks for your email address (and various other information) before it will allow you to download OpenOffice.org, note that it was a 'sponsered link' (ie, the web site payed Google to put it at the top), and note that the link under it, to OpenOffice.org is not a sponsered link and does not ask for anything before allowing you to download OpenOffice.org.

Lord Rybec