July 27, 2014 at 10:08Switching to LibreOffice saves Toulouse 1 million euros
Free software saves millions of dollars and euros to organizations using it instead of proprietary products. This is especially noticeable in the case of large state structures.
Another city (after Munich), which migrated to the STR, was French Toulouse. By replacing the Microsoft Office municipal desktops with LibreOffice, the city will save about 1 million euros in three years.
Toulouse is the fourth largest city in France with 447,000 inhabitants, according to the 2011 census. Together with 37 suburbs, the population rises to 714,000. The modernization affected about 10,000 computers in the administrations of these territories.
Administration officials said they proceeded from purely pragmatic considerations. If any program is cheaper and performs its task well, you need to install it.
Migration from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice in Toulouse began in 2012 and took a year and a half, now 90% of desktop computers are spared Microsoft office programs. Office suite licenses cost Toulouse € 1.8 million every three years. Therefore, an investment of € 800 thousand in an upgrade is a reasonable investment.
I wonder how the staff training was organized. A volunteer was selected from each department who, after a short course, helped everyone else in the department.
At the request of individual employees, they were left with MS Office along with LibreOffice. It turned out that some complex Word macros and complex Excel files cannot be played in LibreOffice. Over time, this will be fixed.
City websites and the internal portal (toulouse.fr, toulouse-metropole.fr, data.grandtoulouse.fr) have been using free software since 2009. Document management and collaboration on documents are provided by Liferay and Alfresco programs , in addition to them, Joomla is used .
About 50% of the servers on the network are running Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. True, strategically important business applications still trust commercial OS and Oracle databases. The representative of the IT department said that he was closely following the development of free alternatives, and in which case migration also makes sense here.
Another city (after Munich), which migrated to the STR, was French Toulouse. By replacing the Microsoft Office municipal desktops with LibreOffice, the city will save about 1 million euros in three years.
Toulouse is the fourth largest city in France with 447,000 inhabitants, according to the 2011 census. Together with 37 suburbs, the population rises to 714,000. The modernization affected about 10,000 computers in the administrations of these territories.
Administration officials said they proceeded from purely pragmatic considerations. If any program is cheaper and performs its task well, you need to install it.
Migration from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice in Toulouse began in 2012 and took a year and a half, now 90% of desktop computers are spared Microsoft office programs. Office suite licenses cost Toulouse € 1.8 million every three years. Therefore, an investment of € 800 thousand in an upgrade is a reasonable investment.
I wonder how the staff training was organized. A volunteer was selected from each department who, after a short course, helped everyone else in the department.
At the request of individual employees, they were left with MS Office along with LibreOffice. It turned out that some complex Word macros and complex Excel files cannot be played in LibreOffice. Over time, this will be fixed.
City websites and the internal portal (toulouse.fr, toulouse-metropole.fr, data.grandtoulouse.fr) have been using free software since 2009. Document management and collaboration on documents are provided by Liferay and Alfresco programs , in addition to them, Joomla is used .
About 50% of the servers on the network are running Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. True, strategically important business applications still trust commercial OS and Oracle databases. The representative of the IT department said that he was closely following the development of free alternatives, and in which case migration also makes sense here.