Would you advise this group to use Open Source?

Mark Walker , whose work with Sussex Community Internet Project I have mentioned before, has posted this interesting challenge to a few lists.

"Further to the debate about open source, several people have mentioned to us that SCIP should develop its use and advocacy of open source software and I am aware that if we decided to start adopting it seriously we would need to begin planning changes to our training courses and technical support.
"This is a difficult, sometimes controversial question to address and I think we would benefit some insight from different people - so I've set up a survey at surveymonkey so we can ask people what they think
"It's at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=9862357645
Now read on for the scenario Mark gives...

The scenario
A local community organisation has three staff using a small office. They work with parents of children with special needs form the surrounding area, providing one-to-one advice and signposting them to other local and national services.
They have two pcs, a printer and email. They use Microsoft Office for word processing, producing letters, leaflets and posters. They manage some information on a database produced in Access by a volunteer some years ago. They keep their accounts on a spreadsheet but are thinking about switching to a different product - someone in the office next to them mentioned Quickbooks. They have a vary basic website entry created by a volunteer two years ago using a free system run by the local paper. They don't know its address.
One person, who works part-time, has been on training courses and is pretty good at office skills - ie word processing, email, spreadsheet, publisher. One of the other people [the manager] is full time, the other is working on a specific project part-time. Both rely heavily on the first person to manage anything beyond basic admin tasks, but they can check the email when the other person isn't there.
One of them has a partner who can sort out some of their technical problems when they arise, although they usually end up calling someone from the computer shop round the corner - an independent outlet that has supplied them with hardware and software for about five years and will do what they can to solve a problem as cheaply as possible.

*** The question
Would you currently recommend that this organisation start moving to using Open Source software?
Survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=9862357645
Update
Dot Org media offer a very useful evaluation of Using Open Source Software in your Nonprofit Organisation.

Comments

[David Brake]

The results from the survey are here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=357645&U=35764536155

I found I couldn't respond because a simple yes/no just wasn't adequate. I would have said "yes" by all means consider switching the word processing and spreadsheet stuff to OpenOffice if you like (since hopefully they don't do anything very complicated with either application) but no don't touch the rest.

FWIW it's running 60% "yes" use OS at the moment
I am stunned by the number of people who suggest a n unsophisticated bunch of users should take up MySQL instead of Access!

[root]

It is a tough one, because his essential argument is around available support and learning curves. Yes, I agree, the GUI on most Open Source products would require a fair learning curve, but the support? Here I would have to disagree, the support provided by the Open Source community is, in my experience as good or better than that of the big corporations. Add to that the ridiculous amount of Open Source software out there, the wealth of features ( just try comparing Blackboard and ATutor or KEWL on a feature basis to see what I mean ) and I would have to say go for it. On a worst case scenario, keep MS Office, download some blogging software or Website Management System off SourceForge, add a php content management system or dump everything, go Linux and with money saved on licences hire an after school technical manager out of the nearest high school.