UK city to move 5,500 desktops to StarOffice

One of the easiest conversations is to move people from MS Office over to one of the many Open Source alternatives. In this case, we see one UK city over to the Open Document compliant software known as StarOffice. Personally, I think that it would have worked just as well to go with Open Office…

One of the easiest conversation is to move people from MS Office over to one of the many Open Source alternatives. In this case, we see one UK city over to the Open Document compliant software known as StarOffice. Personally, I think that it would have worked just as well to go with Open Office…

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.” Source: DesktopLinux

[tags]sun microsystems,staroffice,open source academy,consortium standards bulletin[/tags]