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Dutch City Of Haarlem Takes Up OpenOffice.org

Posted by timothy on from the 2000-here-2000-there dept.

zerdood writes "An article in IDA states that Haarlem, the capitol of North Holland, has succeeded in converting 2000 desktops to use OpenOffice.org. They initiated the migration in response to the 500,000 Euro licensing fees paid every year to Microsoft for an upgrade from Office '97. Training people to use OpenOffice.org is projected to cost about one tenth of that. Jan van de Straat, director of R&D for the city, has also stated that they could move up to 20% of the city's desktops to Linux without any problems. Their servers already use Penguin Power."

2 of 32 comments (clear)

  1. Re:w00t another for OSS by nocomment · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My company moved to OpenOffice.org and people complained like mad that they were having problems. Until...we put shortcuts to Write and Calc on their desktop and renamed the shortcuts to "Word" and "Excel". The complaints literally vanished overnight.

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  2. Encouraging... by dn15 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's encouraging to see a story about someone who has actually made the switch to some sort of OSS as opposed to someone talking about it. I don't mean to imply that the other places considering the switch were insincere, but it's a lot easier to take seriously when you've eliminated the possibility that it was just a stunt to get reduced prices on MS Office. Nice work, Haarlem!