So, with a heavy heart I reached for my dog-eared copy of the Internet, to see what this would cost me. I knew I needed Microsoft Office Professional, as Microsoft Access is occasionally needed. I found that a full retail licence from BT Business Direct cost £205 plus VAT, not so bad after all.

I considered buying 12 of these full retail licences, but decided in the end to contact our BT account manager to request a quote. I was informed by BT that the full retail licences could not be used on a server; no explanation was given for this, but I was assured that this was the case.  The result was that the cost would in fact be £288 each, an additional £1000. A rather strange reversal of the usual - the more you buy, the lower the unit price.

As I was going to be installing on a virtual machine, I was also interested in knowing that I would be able to reinstall on a new virtual machine, if for any reason I needed to rebuild. For some reason this seemed far less clear than I would have liked, but ultimately I did receive that assurance; albeit in a way that left me wondering if that would indeed ultimately prove to be the case.

One additional confusion is that 2013 is just out, and so there was a choice of 2010 or 2013, we had been told to buy 2010 or later, in order to work with Business Intelligence, but then I read an article on ZDNet Can Microsoft bring BI to the masses if the Excel 2013 masses can’t get BI?. The upshot seems to be that Microsoft Office Professional 2013 may not be enough - I might need Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013, which as far as I can see is not even listed on BT Business Direct.

I visited the Microsoft page on Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 but this left me none the wiser. Following the link to Licensing Options looked promising, but was not. Following the link to View Licensing Options - seemed to suggest that the only option was a three year Enterprise Agreement, but there was no pricing shown, not even under the “Volume Pricing” heading.

So now I need to re-contact BT to find out if they offer Professional Plus 2013 and try and find out if this is what I need and whether I can in fact reinstall on different hardware.

To seasoned purchasers of proprietary software this might all seem par for the course, or perhaps there is an easier way that I have not yet found? I suspect that the truth is that we are too large a company for buying single licences, but too small a company for an enterprise agreement. Neither fish nor fowl, as the saying goes.

But, for the past 5 years or so, I have not had to think about licensing once. If I need a copy of office, then I download OpenOffice (or more recently LibreOffice); if I need a desktop publishing program, then I download Scribus; a graphics editor, the GIMP; an illustrator, Inkscape. And for each of those programs I can install it for all staff without even a thought about how many licences I might have available.

There is no way out for me, sadly, and I will need to navigate these difficult waters whether I like it or not, but there is a better way and that way is Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

The mystery is that, at one of our branches, it reduces size to 0, but is never actually removed; after which time the file cannot be edited until that lock file is manually removed.

Both servers have the same davfs2.conf and I have done a diff between the two servers:

# for file in `find /usr/lib/openoffice/ -name *.xcs -type f`; \
  do echo "=== $file ==="; \
  ssh root@other-server "cat $file" | diff $file - ; \
  done

But there are no differences.  I have checked users’ davfs2.conf files, but these are all commented out entirely.

Previously I had “fixed” this problem, by setting UseDocumentOOoLockFile to false in:

/usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.2/share/registry/schema/org/openoffice/Office/Common.xcs

This doesn’t stop the lock files being created, but it does tell Openoffice not to worry about them.  Unfortunately this no longer seems to be working, and I really can’t understand why.

Currently I have “fixed” the problem by setting davfs2.conf to:

use_locks 0

This is now allowing the lock files to be removed properly.  I believe that actually this will work quite well, with the UseDocumentOOoLockFile set to true, given that 99.9% of our documents are Openoffice documents.  Always assuming I can persuade Openoffice to obey its own registry!

First I removed OpenOffice:

$ sudo apt-get --purge remove ".*openoffice.*"

Then I visited the Document Foundation LibreOffice website and downloaded:

• LibO_3.3.0_beta2_Linux_x86_install-deb_en-US.tar.gz
• LibO_3.3.0_beta2_Linux_x86_langpack-deb_en-GB.tar.gz

Then, having checked that the md5sums matched, I extracted both with tar -xvvzf and changed to the DEBS directory in each and ran:

$ sudo dpkg -i *.deb

All very clumsy, but this was only my work PC, which isn’t mission critical, as I generally use NX client to log into my desktop on our LTSP Server.

So what are my first impressions? Sadly these will have to wait for another day, apart from the obvious branding change, I couldn’t see much different, but the good news is that it does all appear to be working.

I am not sure whether LibreOffice yet has the Go-OO Patches patches, which I believe were included by default in Debian and Ubuntu, but the fact that they are being combined into the core must be good news.

I am really hoping that LibreOffice improves quickly on OpenOffice, which still falls considerably short of Microsoft Office for power users. In particular Macros, Pivot Tables, Conditional Formatting, and Mailmerge all need a lot of work. Not to speak of the appalling performance, it really is a system hog. I can’t help feeling that it really needs to be re-written from scratch, but I appreciate that is unrealistic.

In the meantime I have hopes that KOffice will soon step up to the mark - KWord’s mailmerge feature is a lesson in simplicity that OpenOffice/LibreOffice would do well to learn.