Open Office: Coping with Online Stampedes

Yesterday Open Office launched it's major upgrade to its open source Microsoft Office bashing office productivity suite, version 3, and it's servers crashed in the stampede to download it. I know, I was part of that stampede.

Now this is not to have a pop at Open Office. Quite the contrary. After all, Open Office is a vast open source community undertaking, backed by Sun and IBM. It would be disingenuous, if not actually positively ungrateful to complain that when I tried to download my FREE copy, all I got was this screen …



I could complain that Apache error message is hardly suitable for public consumption: ContentHelmNoodle anyone? But that's hardly Open Office's fault.

But actually, this is a story of doing the right thing, when you're best estimates gets trampled by the crush of wildly keen users.

Step 1 Apologise
Even though Open Office are giving us a word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation tool, drawing program and maths tools for FREE, they still apologised. Of course, this is tricky to do on your website, as it's been clobbered by user demand. So you have to get a statement out to the news agencies, such as this article in The Register. Plus send emails to your user base:

All,

We must apologize. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is proving immensely,
staggeringly popular. And our site is down as a result. While we fix
things, we urge you to be patient and try again later on tonight,
tomorrow, this week. It will still be there.

Oh, by popular, we mean it: figure hundreds of thousands of users,
mostly Windows users, but also Mac OS X and Linux and Solaris users,
all trying to download it all at once.....

Cheers, and thanks for your patience,
Louis

Step 2 Clear the Boards
If you're being swamped, stop trying to swim elegantly, and concentrate on just staying afloat. Or in web terms, pull down your usual site and focus all your bandwidth on doing the one user task nearly everyone is wanting: to get their hands on the new release.
























Step 3 Return to Normal
Eventually things will stabilise and in a couple of days OpenOffice.org will return to normality.

Step 4 Tell the Story
Some people may grumble, but actually a bit of mad rush creates some incident, a marketing story to tell.

The stampede demonstrates the power of open source movement, and its continued momentum. Did Microsoft servers collapse after the release of the last version of MS Office? Not so far as I'm aware.

Stories such as this, in ZDet, talks of the opportunity for Sun and IBM and Open Office, as the global financial crisis puts more pressure on IT budgets. So having ordinary users mob the release of Open Office 3 can only add to its kudos, and the manner in which Open Office responded was just right.