1. Make a Strategic Commitment: Successful firms take a long-term view of their investments in OpenOffice.org that's deeply connected to their enterprise architecture.
2. Understand Your Business Process Needs: Develop a clear framework for how OpenOffice supports business productivity requirements and information strategy.
3. Be Willing to Maintain a Hybrid OpenOffice.org/Microsoft Environment: The providers of OpenOffice.org recognize that up to one-third of iWorkers will require Microsoft Office apps for their advanced features.
4. Identify Third-Party Dependencies Up Front: Understanding which roles in your organization frequently share information externally can help identify where interoperability is a must.
5. Seek Out Like-Minded Partners: Know before entering agreements what partners or vendors support for OpenOffice.org is, as well as its plans to integrate with the platform.
6. Know Your Viable Workarounds: Would PDF or file converters effectively minimize risk, or would they be truly disruptive?
7. Get Involved with OpenOffice.org Communities: Active participation will help to extend networks and share innovations.
8. Don't Be Dogmatic About OpenOffice.org: Just because you're committed to the OpenOffice.org platform doesn't mean you can lose sight of accomplishing specific business goals.
9. Demonstrate the Quality of the Tools: iWorkers will reject OpenOffice.org if they feel shortchanged.
10. Provide Training and Support: Like any technology or application, users benefit from self-paced training, access to FAQs and resources that can answer their questions when they run into a problem.

SHERI MCLEISH [www.forrester.com] is an analyst at Forrester Research, where she serves information and knowledge management professionals. She will be speaking at Forrester's 2010 Content and Collaboration Forum, October 7-8, in Washington, D.C.