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Bristol City Council Saves with ODF
March 14, 2008
Posted by: Glyn Moody
Not a new story, but a little bit more detail about Bristol City Council's move to StarOffice, the non-freebie version of OpenOffice.org:
Bristol City Council's switch to StarOffice in 2005 has led to a major reduction of IT costs, says Gavin Beckett, the council's ICT Strategy manager.
StarOffice is Sun Microsystems' proprietary suite of office applications, which is based on the Open Source OpenOffice. In 2006 Bristol took the further step of adopting the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF).
Speaking at a conference on ODF in the Netherlands last month, Beckett said that implementing StarOffice for 5,500 desktops in Bristol saved 1.1 million GBP (1.4 million euro) in comparison to the total cost of implementing Microsoft Office. "The licences for StarOffice cost us 186,000 GBP (243,000 euro), in comparison to 1.4 million GBP (1.8 million euro) for MS Office."
These major savings were offset slightly by extra time needed for implementing StarOffice. Implementation cost the city council 484,000 GBP (632,000 euro), double the estimate for MS Office. This was due to document conversion and training, said the IT Strategy manager. Explaining and troubleshooting the new office applications took several months more than planned.
But along with the good news, comes the following bad news:
"Our biggest challenge is that many of our business system suppliers and service delivery partners use Microsoft formats and applications." Many of the applications made by these companies use Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language to enable integration with office software. "We need to convince them to invest in support for ODF, but that has been an uphill battle for the last three years. Some of these companies simply refused to support ODF."
Tut-tut. Come on business system suppliers and service delivery partners: you must try harder.
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About the author
Glyn Moody Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).
Comments received
Bryan said on Friday, 14 March 2008
"Some of these companies simply refused to support ODF."
You'd think a client such as this would carry enough weight to persuade them. Sigh!
So much for "The customer is always right"...
Glyn Moody said on Friday, 14 March 2008
Those brain implants are just *so* deep...
SMP said on Monday, 17 March 2008
"Our biggest challenge is that many of our business system suppliers and service delivery partners use Microsoft formats and applications." Many of the applications made by these companies use Microsoft's Visual Basic programming language to enable integration with office software. "We need to convince them to invest in support for ODF, but that has been an uphill battle for the last three years. Some of these companies simply refused to support ODF."
I would just write ODF (or PDF for non-editable content) in as a requirement to tender for government contracts, and make the free download link for OpenOffice known to them - end of story. Don't forget that OpenOffice is compatible with MS Office in that it reads and writes MS binary formats - it is MS Office that goes out of it's way to be incompatible.
If they can't be bothered to install a free application and insist instead that the government pay to install software compatible with theirs, then they aren't serious about winnin
Cross platform macros... said on Monday, 17 March 2008
Here in NZ, we have an OOo expert who specialises in writing cross-platform macros that work on both MS Office and OpenOffice.org without alteration (as I understand it, OOo's macro language can't be identical to MS's proprietary VBA language due to various patent/copyright/trademark issues). Surely that's the way forward.
Dave