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

Spreadsheet in XLS

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else find the humor in the spreadsheet being an XLS file? I figure if the target audience is a group of people who use MS products, then they'll have no problem opening that XLS file.

Step one...

[dankdirk77]

Step one... stop bending over

Step two... remove Microsoft "probe"

*FREEDOM*

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.

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This is a pretty comprehensive study(tho one imagines that it could get out of date pretty quickly).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.