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City Of Austin Migrating To OpenOffice.org
An anonymous reader writes "NewsForge.com has a story up this morning about the City of Austin and the results of their pilot program on OpenOffice.org. The bottom line is this: they have found that more than 80% of the city's 5K desktops can use OO.o instead of MS Office. Let the migrations begin!"
....sounds like Austin has a savvy fellow in the CIO spot.
The Army reading list
From: Scott Brown
Subject: [alg] Another Open Source win at the City
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:57:01 -0600
To: alg@austinlug.org
I thought a few of you might be interested in this...
We just concluded our first round of "official" Linux pilots, with one
of those being an OpenOffice replacement of Microsoft Office. It turns
out that the limited pilot we did (40 users) provided enough information
to be able to start converting some departments and users over to OO
from MS Office. First on the schedule is my department, Communications
and Technology Management, which will be having MS Office *uninstalled*
and OO installed in it's place on the majority of department desktops.
That should be around 300 people (we can't get everyone off MS Office
right now as we have one major application, the Agenda Management System
for the City Council, that requires the MS programs).
Training programs and help desk support is being put in place so it
looks like OO will be there for the long-term. Our pilot figured out
that about 80% of the users at the City could use OO instead of MS
Office so, at the very least, the City will not be paying Redmond for
anymore new licenses and at the very best, it will start converting
those apps that require MS Office over to something that will work in
the new OO environment.
We're finishing up the documentation for the rest of the pilots so I'll
keep ya'll posted...
-s.
--
Scott Brown
Technology and Support Services
OpenNetworks
website: http://www.opennetworks.org
DMCA only bans defeating 'copy protection'. If there's some obfuscation in there that's claimed to be 'copy protection', then the DMCA applies. As it is, the format is totally obscure but that's just a concequence of bad design. As a result it's legal. You can't copyright file formats. You can patent them, but MS hasn't done that with current office formats.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I've tested Access 2000 under Linux using Codeweaver's CrossOver Office product - http://www.codeweavers.com/
It works very well, and i have complicated vba code running - the reports previewed fine, queries good, forms, etc...
you can download a version to do testing. Access was the only thing holding me back from moving to Linux - i use it all the time
What i would love to see would be Corel open sourcing the Paradox db so it could be ported to Linux - that was a great platform...
IBM's Linux Technology Center is in Austin...
I would guess that people making these decisions in Austin are either influenced by, educated by, or former employees of the university.
Actually, while good guesses, neither of the suggestions above is relevant. I'm a city employee, and I'm familiar with some of the decision making that went on. A couple of things occurred within the last 12+ months that caused this to occur. The first is an economy that tanked. The second was the promotion of a new CIO who is open minded when it comes to technology. There was also extreme disgruntlement (internally and externally) with the contract the city signed with Microsoft (see Joe Barr's Linuxworld articles). This is just a start, the city is also looking at using Linux.