EU Publishes Open Source Migration Guidelines

Skunil writes "The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS)-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications. These guidelines have been designed to help public administrators decide whether a migration to OSS should be undertaken and describe, in broad technical terms, how such a migration could be carried out. They are based on practical experience of a limited number of publicly available case studies, and cover a wide range of management and technical concerns."

Comments

Wow great guide

[bogie]

I'd really suggest you download the pdf before commenting. It's really quite a piece of work. In fact it looks like it might be the most comprehensive guide yet written on how to migrate to opensource. This is good stuff.

Armed with this and of course google and you'd be way ahead of the curve in planning or evaluating a migration to opensource.

Kudos to the authors.

Re:Wow great guide

[Deusy]

It's really quite a piece of work. In fact it looks like it might be the most comprehensive guide yet written on how to migrate to opensource. This is good stuff.

Yeah, riiiiiiiight.

The first thing I do with any of these 'migration' things is to flip straight to the bit on groupware since that is the single most difficult piece of the puzzle to place; especially document management and scheduling.

What does this paper say? I paraphrase: "Er... well... there's no real option other than web-based groupware although there's Kroupware that we have yet to evaluate."

Really... you could have fooled me!

Then the comments on document management are that the only project they know of is no longer actively maintained.

They really didn't look very hard! (And that's not the only option.)

Really, when I see that they gloss over possibly the most important (read: least known) parts then I'm anything but impressed.

Opportunity knocks

[rsborg]

This is a pretty comprehensive study(tho one imagines that it could get out of date pretty quickly). One thought that came up was, what about the areas in the article where OSS comes up short? For example, from the article:

11.6.2. Personal databases held centrally or locally
Ad hoc personal databases are not well supported in OSS. There is no direct equivalent to Access, nor is one being developed. Several of the groupware packages do offer some capability in this area using a variety of OSS SQL databases as a back-end. In some cases (such as NullLogic) ordinary users can only use pre-defined queries. Some offer the ability to define forms that can be used to store and access data.

Is there someone who could either rebut this statement, or would want to work on a replacement? Yes, Access sucks and is the bane of any data-warehousing project... but it's utility is the reason there are so many small but completely critical .mdb files out there.

Re:Spreadsheet in XLS

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a ninny, the document is FOR people using PROPRIETARY products contemplating a move to OSS.

Of course chances are greater than good that they will not be able to read an .sxw document.

I wonder why...?

[SoSueMe]

Perhaps they are going this way because of poor language support, among other things.

Here's a possible example:

The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS)-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications.

They have been developed with guidance from public sector IT experts from Denmark, Finland, Italy, Germany, Malta, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey.

If you look at the details of MS Bulletin ms03-045 you see the patch has problems with third party apps in the languages:

Brazilian, Czech,Danish, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Six of the eight authoring countries are on the troubled patch list.

Perhaps Isreal is not the only country they pissed off once too often.

Re:Step one...

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

but last I checked, it's *nix only.

But you've said that you're getting away from Win*. Isn't a worthy *NIX client what you're looking for?