Public administrations that want to move to vendor independent open source applications need to put a lot of effort in communication, recommends Massimo Carnevali, until recently the IT manager of the municipality of Bologna in Italy. "Communicate to everybody, from users to management. Explaining where users can find help could be more important than actually providing it."
"Explain that this move will improve the IT system as well as reduce costs" stresses Carnevali. He presented on the move to vendor independent open source applications at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference on 18 November in the city of Bolzano. "A smooth first hundred days are vital."
The city of Bologna started its move to open source software in 2004. It has for example no completed the move to OpenOffice, an open source suite of office applications, on half of its 3600 PCs, spread over 65 offices in the city. On 900 others PCs a proprietary vendor's office suite is still present, but no longer the default. On the remaining 900 open office is installed alongside the proprietary office.
"What now need to remove the final dependencies on the proprietary office suite, and then can complete the migration. After that, we will move to the open document format as our default."
The reasons for the administration of Bologna to move to open source include medium and long term savings, strengthening local IT service providers, viability of data and IT vendor independence, Carnevali sums up in his presentation.
Fear of change
The biggest obstacles, on the other hand, are applications that depend on the proprietary office suite. "Users have developed complex macro's that are hard to convert, and there are problems with the formatting of tables and filters."
He also warns that many users fear changes to their computing environment. "The biggest obstacle is the user that wants to continue to do the same things as before, in much the same way."
More information:
Migrazione a OOO presentation by Massimo Carnevali (in Italian, pdf)
Document on migrating to Open Office in the Municipality of Bologna (in Italian, odt)