In the German city of Freiburg, four hundred of the two thousand PCs used by the city council are now running OpenOffice.
The migration to the Open Source suite of office applications is a intermediate goal, saving the city up to half a million euro in licence costs. The city's final aim is to switch to an Open Source desktop.
The council began its office application migration last July, when it decided to use the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF) as a document standard.
Rüdiger Czieschla, the city's IT manager, discussed the migration last Thursday at the Open Source Software Conference and Exposition in Bern, Switzerland. The city council prefers to avoid becoming entangled in the discussion on ODF versus Microsofts proposal, OOXML, Czieschla said. "However, it is clear this debate has seriously damaged the standardisation organisations. Public institutions can no longer rely on them."
Freiburg city council is moreover not interested in criticising software monopolies, he said. "We require applications that do their job. We do not need them updated every two years." Settling on Open Standards and OpenOffice was the result of a selection process that favoured applications delivering interoperability and platform independence. "We do not forbid proprietary software. We will provide temporary solutions, to make the transition to the new system easier for suppliers."
The city council set a goal for migrating to an Open Source, server-based desktop solution, Czieschla said. To help application vendors make the switch, Freiburg's IT administrators provide a reference system. "To date, all of our suppliers have been able to adapt their applications to this platform independent system."
His colleague Andreas Kawohl added that the city's migration to OpenOffice takes time and that the city administrators need guidance. "We explained that it was not a dangerous switch, we were not going to lose information. We presented it as a new technology and made clear that we would help them adjust." The IT department detailed which steps would be taken and what was needed from the city administrators. "We are not forcing our colleagues to change; in the initial phase they can try out the new tools side by side with the existing applications. Neither do we immediately remove applications that are not yet adapted to the new environment."
© European Communities 2008
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Open Office Migration in Freiburg (audio, mp3, in German)