| UK city to move 5,500 desktops to StarOffice |
Mar. 31, 2006
The Bristol (UK) City Council Thursday made the decision to convert its 5,500 desktops from Microsoft Office to Sun Microsystems's OpenDocument Format-compliant StarOffice office suite. The city, after extensive study, concluded that it would save 60 percent of total costs of ownership over a five-year period by making the switch.
As an assist to other UK cities, it made the documentation of its analysis and other materials available at the Open Source Academy (OSA) website in the UK.
"The news of such a significant cost saving is particularly significant for three reasons," wrote analyst Andy Updegrove in the Consortium Standards Bulletin.
"First, it involves a switch to a commercial product (StarOffice) that will require payment of licensing fees rather than conversion to one of the free open source implementations of ODF, such as OpenOffice. Second, the switch is based upon a full analysis of all costs of purchase, installation, re-training and support. And third, it involved a head-to-head contest between Sun and Microsoft, with MS pitching hard, but unsuccessfully, to avoid losing the customer."
The Bristol council said it is expecting StarOffice to produce a total cost of ownership of 670,000 pounds ($1.2m) over five years, compared to 1.7m ($3.0m) for Microsoft Office, although it admits that convincing users to make the switch was as significant a challenge as proving cost savings.
"Our biggest challenge was encouraging staff to be open-minded about anything that wasn't MS Office. Microsoft has become so dominant and ubiquitous that the default assumption for many people is that everything else is inferior, and that the only way to accomplish work is to do it in the exact way that an MS Office product does it," Gavin Beckett, Bristol City Council's IT strategy manager, told the OSA, a project funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
Since the Sept. 23 decision by the state of Massachusetts to implement OpenDocument Format (ODF) by Jan. 1, 2007, the topic has attracted much international attention.
In January, a group of federal IT managers endorsed Linux for US government use, and in December, the Swiss government said it plans to switch 3,000 of its office desktops to Novell SUSE Linux from Unix and Windows.
In February, the Republic of South Africa Revenue Service issued an RFP (request for proposal) for Linux desktops to help the agency do its tax collecting. As a result, 14,000 Windows XP SP2 desktops will be migrated to Linux.
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