The University of Verona in Italy started a three year program last January to migrate most of its more than 4000 PCs to open source. It is likely that the university will switch its PCs to GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu.
The university's migration project is titled OSA - Open Source di Ateneo. "In Italian 'osa' also means 'dare to'" says Dr. Guido Gonzato, one of the IT administrators at the university involved in the project.
The university in January began to educate its staff about open source. The IT administrators are trying not to disrupt routines, and by training the staff they hope to minimise the resistance to change.
During the past few months, courses were held to teach the university's staff about Ubuntu GNU/Linux. "These are basic courses, aimed at people with limited computer expertise and they are going surprisingly well", Gonzatto writes in an emailed message.
"Participants find it not hard at all to work with Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox. Some of the them even helped us by highlighting some differences, so we could explain these to others."
In this first year, staff will also begin to use open source applications such as web browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird and OpenOffice for office applications.
Starting next January, the university will begin using open IT standards file formats, replacing proprietary formats. Any document that is being sent to or received from the university's central administration, must be stored in an open file format. "This will also prepare the replacement of the proprietary Microsoft Office by open source office productivity tools that use open IT formats", Dr. Gonzato explains.
In 2011 all PCs will be moved to open source. Gonzato already knows of one major hurdle, an accounting application that many at the university use and which at the moment depends on Microsoft's proprietary office formats, "If we manage to have it modified to support OpenOffice, our route to a complete free and open source adoption will be made much easier."
According to Dr. Gonzato, the move to an open source desktop is a logical next step. "The university is already using open source such as Apache for its web servers and PostgreSQL for its databases, and computer labs at the Science Faculty use GNU/Linux and open source scientific applications. The OSA project will simply extend this philosophy to the desktop."
Gonzato presented the migration plan at the Third Italian Conference on Free Software (Confsl), in the city of Bologna on 12 June.
More information:
Giornale Adige news item (in Italian)
Verona University's open source website
Conferenza Nazionale Sul Software Libero website (in Italian)