Well we are well on our way to rolling out Open Office in the Bainbridge Island School District. Two weeks ago we started our notebook boot camps. These sessions are trainings for teachers that are getting new laptops. If a teacher wants to get a laptop they must attend the training. To date we have taught over 150 teachers on their new laptops. Part of the training is an introduction to Open Office, which is important since all laptops only come configured with Open Office.

Our experience to date is that nearly 90% of all documents open just fine in Open Office. Of the remaining 10%, 7 or 8 percent need some minor tweaks like fonts, margins etc... The other 2 or 3 percent are more problematic and may need a complete rebuild. Most of the documents that have serious problems have been formatted in Word in some odd way or some very strange font has been used. Experience has shown that by copying and pasting the text and reapplying the formatting in Open Office doesn't take too long, so rebuilding a document is really not a big deal.

So, in order to get buy in from teachers and other staff, we are taking all the savings from our switch to Open Office and adding it to our professional development budget. For our small school district, about 4000 students, we are saving about $50,000 per year on MS licensing. All of this is being added to the training budget. We are using the money to train the staff on Open Office and other Open Source software packages. It is really cool as we never trained our staff in MS Office so now we can provide training in more of the features in Open Office. We are providing numerous sessions this summer and will continue to do sessions throughout the year. Part of the money being spent is to bring in Solveig Haugland to do an entire week of Open Office classes. Solveig is one of the best experts on Open Office out there. Check her out at http://openoffice.blogs.com/

I will post more as we progress farther into the school year! Wish us luck.