Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Novell Signs Linux Deal with Australian Government

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the foot-in-the-door dept.

truthsearch writes to tell us ITWire is reporting that Novell has just signed a deal with the Australian government to become an approved supplier of Open Source software and solutions. This deal, believed to be the first of it's kind, "places Novell on the NSW government panel of preferred open source suppliers. This is the first panel contract of its kind by an Australian jurisdiction that contains provisions specific to open source software, giving government agencies and departments formal access to Linux solutions."

3 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. The Australian Government? by UoNTidal · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...tell us ITWire is reporting that Novell has just signed a deal with the Australian government...

    As much as I like to think that my state is a little more important than the others, it's pretty obvious from the title of TFA that the deal has been signed with the New South Wales state government, not the Australian federal government.

  2. State, not Federal Govt by wylf · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article clearly states that the contract is with the New South Wales State Government. So this covers New South Wales only, not the entire country, as the slashdot title indicates.

    Also, just because Novell is now an approved supplier doesn't mean that NSW State Government can't implement non-Novell solutions, or purchase OSS (solutions) from anyone other than Novell. AFAIK, it merely means that some paperwork can be skipped in the procurement process. For instance, I think that when dealing with a non-approved supplier, evidence of comparative offerings from at least 2 other suppliers is also required. At least, that is what it would mean in a Federal Government context.

  3. How about ODMA support? by jesterzog · · Score: 4, Informative

    What programs are government agencies using that can't run on Linux?

    If you can suggest an Open Source application that cleanly supports an interface with Document Management Systems, such as ODMA, I'd be very interested.

    I work in a (non-US) government department, and we're required by law to keep all documents for certain amounts of time ... the exact amount of which depends on the type of document. We also have some legal requierments to protect certain types of documents from some employees. (eg. If two branches of the department are supposed to be providing independent advice on the same topic from different perspectives, we need to be able to demonstrate they haven't been reading each other's work.) This sort of thing is also often very important for law firms.

    We do this by educating staff to save documents into a Document Managenent System (we currently use Interwoven's Worksite but aren't locked into it), which requires them to enter some extra metadata about what the document is, and helps to centralise the whole document management thing immensely.

    I use OSS at home for my own things all the time, and at home I've gone without Microsoft products at all for at least 2 years, but last time I looked at the main Office tools (OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, etc), I couldn't find any reliable support for ODMA. To be fair, Microsoft Office also has hopeless half-done support for ODMA, but at least it's popular enough that the main Document Management System providers have grudgingly written their own plugins to work with MS Office. ODMA's an open protocol that's already supported by much DMS software, though, and it's unclear to me why it wasn't supported by open source office and related products long ago.