The Polish city of Łeba has nearly completely migrated to OpenOffice, the Open Source alternative for Microsoft Office, writes Jakilinux, a Polish Open Source news site.
OpenOffice was introduced gradually over the past few years, by installing it only on new PCs. These replaced the old PCs running MS Windows 98 and MS Office 97. The new OpenOffice PCs use MS Windows XP.
The Polish city of Łeba has nearly completely migrated to OpenOffice, the Open Source alternative for Microsoft Office, writes Jakilinux, a Polish Open Source news site.
Prior to using OpenOffice, the city used pirated copies of MS Office, admits Radosławowi Czyżewski, IT administrator for the city council, in his interview with Jakilinux. "We had only one official licence. My predecessor was cost-effective, but risky."
Czyżewski says that the first of the city's thirty users was the city's secretary. She was so impressed with the performance of the new PC and the increased stability of the operating system, that she hardly noticed the change from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. "Most users assume everything is OK when their PC boots up and shows 'Windows'. I guess that if I would install GNU/Linux, change the start-up screen and adapt some of the desktop icons, they would assume it is the new Windows", he told Jakilinux.
The city's workers now create documents using the Open Standard ODF. Czyżewski abandoned trying to convert all existing MS Office documents. If documents are sent electronically outside the city, workers use PDF.
Intranet
Apart from OpenOffice, the Łebie city workers are using several other Open Source applications, such as the web browser Firefox, the email-client Thunderbird, the image manipulation programme GIMP and the graphics drawing application Inkscape. The city is also using Open Source for its Intranet server, combining the Ubuntu GNU/Linux server distribution with web server Apache, database management system MySql and Samba, Open Source software for sharing office documents in IT environments using MS Windows.
More information:
- Jakilinux news item (in Polish)
- Pro-Linux news item (in German)
- Leba city website
- OpenOffice in Polish municipalities wiki