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Scottish Police Revert to Microsoft Office
LordGuha writes "The Central Scotland Policy is removing StarOffice and replacing it with Microsoft Office citing lower maintenance and running costs and greater integration with other departments. According to the article StarOffice was implemented in 2000 when the department was low in cash but lately have estimated that the Microsoft software would cost no more and lead to greater efficiencies."
It should be said that the quality of that version of StarOffice isn't what we can have now with OpenOffice.org or the new StarOffice.
Firstly, it's Central Scotland Police, ie the police in the Central region, not all.d own_police/ ;-)
Secondly, they are migrating nearly *everything* back to MS. TheRegister have a better description here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/ms_lochs_
complete with anglo-saxon mispronunciation joke
It's a shame, but maybe they are right. It's not easy to pay enough for good linux/unix admins on public sector wages.
Central Scotland Police are, as the article states, one of eight forces in Scotland. They also cover a relatively small area and employ "about 1000 officers" - compared with 7500 for the largest Scottish Police force, Strathclyde Police.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
How can a $300 software package be cheaper then free?
I don't think Star Office is free. I think you're confusing it with Open Office.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
a) StarOffice isn't free. You're thinking of OpenOffice.
b) Large organisations don't pay list price. This is software, Microsoft will have discounted it down to a point where they can regain the business.
You even have your choice of a wide variety of WYSIWYG web editors if you need formatting capability. You could probably put together a pretty powerful web-based office suite.
RTFA. The OP didn't bother to comprehend what he was reading and decide to spout a load of crap. The 5% figure in the article relates to the size of Central Scotland police compared to all of the scottish forces put together. 100% of Central Scotland police are / were using Star Office.
FYI, your post is just as useless as the previous one.
Central Scotland Police has signed a three-year deal with Microsoft that will see the force standardise on Microsoft Server 2003 and Windows XP (SP2). The deal was struck under the Office of Government Commerce's (OGC) agreement with Microsoft to offer preferential rates for public sector organisations, and will cost the force less than £60,000 per year. 60000 pounds = +/- 60 pounds/workplace = +/- 108 USD It is not because they could not read the other documents, it is because MS offered them W2k3 + Office2k3 for a mere 100 dollars! Where can I get their software that cheap?
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RTFA They only have to pay 100$/seat for the Windows + Office deal.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
Anyone having trouble with it still is usually using Linux and hasn't gotten their true-type fonts working correctly.
They actually say that OpenOffice and opensource has lower TCO if the rest converts to it too. The conversion costs are what drives up the cost to MS level. Nice detail (-:
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Q: How was copper wire invented?
;)
A: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny...
Well, I'm all Scottish and I just wanted to point out that, as a race, we have the proportionately highest incidence of philanthropy of any nation on the planet*. Look at folk like Carnegie. Don't get me started on inventions, for which we are also, as a race, reknowned...
John (haggis eating**, kilt wearing***, bagpipe loving**** Scotsman)
* Source: John's International Survey of Racial Philanthropy, August 2005;
** McSween's;
*** Only at Weddings or when abroad;
**** I lied about loving bagpipes. They are no less than weapons of mass distruction disguised as musical instruments...
vi? pfft
Don't you hate meta-sigs?
Of course this is not a problem with OpenOffice per se, it's a problem of imperfect interoperability between OpenOffice and Word, i.e. the Word loader in OO is imperfect. But this shouldn't be a problem if all your documents are in OpenOffice format, and all your users use it - provided you don't need to exchange many documents with other organisations using Word. I have many large and complex documents created in OpenOffice (which is far nicer to use than Word), and because I have no need to ever load them in Word at all (they get distributed as PDF), the solution works well.
I've started playing around with the OpenOffice 2 beta and it's support for loading Word files has definitely improved (as has it's PDF export). Some of my older .doc files that I previously could not open in OO 1 I can now open perfectly. I hope it's good enough though to start being compelling enough to attract "converts". Converting to open formats costs money in the short term, of course, and will be a "painful" process for the world to go through, but the whole idea is that you save money in the long term, and ultimately it's necessary to move away from proprietary formats, because it's needlessly inefficient.
No, StarOffice is not open source software. You're thinking of OpenOffice. Sun still sells StarOffice as a proprietary office suite.
StarOffice is OSS isn't it?
No. Some of the code is open, some is closed and the license is commercial. The OS version is OpenOffice which would have saved them 25 pounds a seat right off the top, at the cost of some of the propriatary code and Sun's support.
Other than that your point stands.
KFG
Where is the OSS answer to Exchange??
Maybe here? I personnaly perfer Novell's (SuSE's) OpenExchange, easier to set up and install. Been using it at the office for over 2 years now.
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
Where is the OSS answer to Exchange??
http://www.scalix.com/
This has NOTHING to do with Linux.
That's not 100% correct. From TFA:
The agency said in 2000 that it would see initial savings of at least £245,000 (US$439,000) from switching to StarOffice and Linux, and that the open-source deployment would allow it to bring productivity software to more of its officers.
The article also states:
In the past, when the agency deployed a new police application on StarOffice and Linux, the application had to be customized to work with the open-source software, Stirling said. It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station, he said.
Despite the focus on StarOffice, that last sentence obviously refers to the Linux Desktop, most likely in relation to its SMB and NT Domain support.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Well, I work IT in a law enforcement agency, and so I can speak to that. The parent is right, you don't know what the Hell you're talking about.
Police use Word to fill in reports, forms, etc. that could definitely not be formatted using Wordpad. They also have to save that form data, which could not be done with a web form or Acrobat Reader.
They also use Word to interact with Excel and Access databases. When you're sending out a notification letter to 180 victims in a given county, you better believe it's a helluva lot easier to use Word's mail merge than typing each name individually in Wordpad.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Trust me, the police not only use Word, but a whole bunch of other software as well. And you should be glad they do.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
funny, I've been making my living for the last 6 years with projects going away from Microsoft and Unix(tm) to Linux, and not a one has gone the other way. We're bound to see a percentage of cases where that happens, but is that the case in the majority of enterprises that have chosen to use open source? Buggy software can be written as either closed or open source, the license of a software has nothing to do with quality. A solid requirements gathering process, management of developers, discipline, version control, regression testing, use of user feedback & bug reporting, these are some things that make good software.
Apparantly the network was linuxservers at branch offices with MS Windows Desktops running StarOffice. To top it off expensive Sun servers running Staroffice stuff was in the mix. This was not what i would call a Linux migration in the first place! It was more of a Sun -> Microsoft migration.
i shpolice_1.html
Even more astonoshing is the fact that Microsoft apparantly promised to help develop an application that according to the Scottish would cost £100.00!
They only paid £60.000 for the licenses so i would say they got a VERY sweat deal on this. Can you get any cheaper than to get paid to use a product?
Read this article for some facts:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/11/HNscott
HTTP/1.1 400
I doubt the networking was broken, that's easy to setup.
More likely the problem was they couldn't "access" their star office based paperwork from *any* police station because the other 95% of police stations PCs would have office and windows which can't open staroffice files.
I spent 9 years working in IT for one of the top 10 police departments in the USA. I mainly did database development and administration, network administration, user support.
There's really not enough information in the fine article to draw a lot of the conclusions being put forth.
In our shop there are, largely speaking, two sides to IT: the mainframe (now super mini) side that contained all the criminal information, and the micro side, used mainly for administrative support. The mobile data terminals and the computers used by most of the sworn population connected to the mainframe. They used pre-designed screens for storing and retrieving information. The support staff used various Office products to provide various services, up to and including reports summarizing criminal data.
But keep in mind that we were a gov't agency. We had to have file interop with the rest of the City, and County, and State, and Feds. We had more severe budget restrictions than most private sector had to deal with. Try not having a pool of money for training for the future year, it isn't fun. When I needed training for a new product, I had to wait for my department head to be out of town and the bureau manager asked me how a project was going. I told him I needed training, he got funds taken out of equipment maintenance to send me to Atlanta for a week. This is not a slush fund, this was money to be used for maintaining the mainframe, fortunately there was some unused funds.
As a rule, if money isn't allocated, it isn't spent. And that is a hard and fast rule.
For the criminal side, they had standards that were dictated by the FBI and the National Criminal Information System. Everything has to be coded in specific ways. Trust me, you DO NOT want to see the information schema! It is not correctly normalized and nothing can be done about it because THEY DON'T CONTROL IT. They had to work around those problems as best they could.
The basic problem is that you don't have a dozen Java programmers and a dozen C++ programmers sitting around just waiting to solve every little problem. We had three network administrators supporting 15+ sites. We had five developers (on the administrative side) for a total micro staff of maybe 15 or so when I left supporting over 2000 officers and another 1800 or so civilian, not including physical networking support (cabling, PC installation and hardware support).
Saying "all you need is a web applet to do X, Y, Z" is disingenuous. It will never be that simple. Until you've lived in police IT for more than 5 years, you won't have a clue what their overall requirements are and you're making assumptions that don't translate. Their data must ultimately fit legally-mandated forms. That's taken care of by tight data restrictions on the criminal side. On the administrative side, by using Office, you have a mobile work force of people who can move back and forth between various other City departments, assuming they can pass the background investigation.
You're talking an insanely complex system and set of requirements that have grown out of old technology over decades and decades of modification.
Yes, it's a MS shop. Started with 3Com 3+Share file servers, went to Lan Manager, now NT Server. Desktops went from Dos to Windows to Win2K and now probably XP. Apps went from Word, Multiplan, DataFlex to Office and SQL Server. There are non-MS technologies both in the server room and on the desktop, but the only place you'll see *nix is on specific apps, such as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System which started out on an RS/6000, I have no idea what it's on, it was not in my realm.
I like *nix, huge pluses over MS servers. But OO/SO just isn't there. The IT requirements for interoperability with so many other departments both in the City and at other layers of gov't are too vast to take a critical area and make it less than 100% compatible with the rest of the infrastructure is bad. I make no claim to have a clue how Scotl
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
It amazes me when open source fanatics are so arrogant as to suggest that anyone preferring a closed source product must either be stupid or receiving bribes from Microsoft. However, that's what happens any time that there's a Slashdot story where an organization chooses a Microsoft product over an open source product.
I have both OpenOffice and Microsoft Office on my systems at home. I have found OpenOffice to be a really competent package that I heartily recommend to many home users. On the other hand, there are things about MS Office (such as the spreadsheet graphing capabilities) which are superior. I've also found the subtle formatting differences that cause widows, orphans, and page break problems when switching between the two packages. I can easily envision a department, agency, etc. regretting a switch to OpenOffice if they exchage documents with others using MS Office.
Interesting to note that they didn't find the Total Cost Ownership was going to be less. Looks like they needed help with Freedom of Information compliance and MS agreed to to create a CMS specificly for them if they'd switch. Yet the TCO still wasn't lower...
Okay, just to flip around the argument a bit...
There are still some major problems for MS Office.
First, it normally defaultly saves in The most current Office Format not something backwards compatible with old copies of Word, yes this is an easy change but people when they are done just hit the save Icon and they are done, they don't want to go through tens of choices and find the document that everyone else uses.
Second, Individuals have invested time in older versions of MS Office. From those High School Computer Class to College Classes, CS101. The education system for computers are so dumb that they teach people how to use a specific version of Microsoft Word but not a Word Processor. So almost everyone who enters the Work field know an out of date Office.
Third, Speed. Office has had a speed problem from the day they invented Clippy. Putting animated characters over the work are slow things down where the users feel it is important, boot up and typing and saving.
Fourth, Interface. MS Office is setup with a good interface Windows, but not for Linux or Mac. Running MS Office under Wine makes it feel completely out of place because it is not using a native toolkit.
Fifth, Work Flow. MS Office's goal is to create all the functionality needed by office workers but it forgot to get the work flow. Watch a non technical person use Office and you will see that their ways of solving problems may surprise you. They avoid using Style Sheets and just go for the Font Drop Down, except for hitting tab they will use the space and they never ever use hot keys for anything. The menus are off limit to them (The same with the windows start button) If they don't see it it must be an advanced feature that they shouldn't use.
MS Office is good for MCSEs but not for normal people.