Moving to the open source suite of office applications OpenOffice is three to four times cheaper than using a proprietary alternative, according to figures presented by the German city of Freiburg.
Rüdiger Czieschla, head of IT at Freiburg, presented on the city's use of OpenOffice on 1 December, at a conference in Badajoz organised by Osepa, a project to increase awareness on the advantages of free and open source software. According to him, using OpenOffice cost the city 200.000 Euro. The proprietary alternative would have cost between 600.000 for just a text editor and 800.000 Euro for the proprietary office suite.
However, cost are only one of many reasons for the migration. The city also wants its office applications to use an open document format (ODF) and to be independent from operating systems. Next in favour of the open source suite are the built-in facilities to save documents as PDF and to minimise the size of presentations. "The user interface of OpenOffice is comparable to Microsoft's Office 2000", says Czieschla.
The city decided in 2007 to move to OpenOffice, replacing a outdated proprietary alternative. It is now using the open source office tools on all the desktop PCs used by the 2300 civil servants.
The migration to OpenOffice was a success, says Czieschla, because the IT department took good care of the support and assistance during the transition. It migrated documents, adapted the document templates, configured OpenOffice's processing of PDFs and ensured the integration with the city's IT system and its proprietary enterprise resource system.
Among the challenges that the IT department faced in the transition, were poor general skills in document processing and dealing with macro's made on the previous system. Exchanging documents with external organisations also required attention, Czieschla says. "There is a need for applications that support ODF natively, such as a simple ODF reader on the Android platform."
More information:
Czieschla's presentation (PDF)