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."

Comments

Corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, it's Central Scotland Police, ie the police in the Central region, not all.
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_d own_police/
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.

Did anyone read TFA

[guruevi]

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?

Still?

[Mr. Underbridge]

Even conceding that current versions of Star/Open Office are far superior to the version in question, Star/OpenOffice obviously still does not work and play well with MS Office. Given that 95% of the Scottish police stations use MS Office, interoperability is a primary requirement.

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.

Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice

[wwphx]

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