25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice

An anonymous reader writes with news that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year. "The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, 'for long term strategic reasons,' which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner [about $7.7 million] worth of proprietary licenses. The ditching of the proprietary alternative is a consequence of the group's move to virtual desktops, allowing staff members to log in on any PC or thin client. The group found that deploying this new desktop infrastructure would 'trigger unacceptably high costs' for proprietary office licenses... The move is Europe's second largest migration project involving public administrations using an open source office suite."

Comments

Re:Stroking a blow!

[hairyfeet]

More likely 'come for the beer, get royally fucked like a drunken prom date when it comes to compatibility'.

Like it or not LO compatibility with MS Office royally sucks ass, and big businesses? they use MS Office. Wait until they start getting complaints like "What is wrong with this doc you sent us, it is just gibberish!" or "Hey we need this Excel sheet to open and all it does is crash!" or "What happened to my PPT? It looks like it has been fed through a grinder!"

LO works great if you are little Timmy writing a report he is gonna print anyway, I give it to my home users for just that purpose. but I have to warn them not to be sending any LO docs by email because anything of ANY complexity, like say headers and footers and fonts? Word Salad. I have seen students dinged over LO docs turning to crap when the teacher opened them in MS Office. it was bad enough at the local college they got a site license for the students just so they wouldn't have to deal with it.

But of course all we'll hear after I post this is "La la la I can't hear you, you must be a M$ Ninja!" to which I say here is the proof, try it yourself IF YOU DARE. There are tons of nice and complex Word docs on government websites, help yourself, download a dozen. do the same for Excel sheets. I'm sure most geeks here have access to MS Office yes? Try editing one of those complex docs or sheets in LO, IF you can get then to open correctly, and then save it in a standard Word 97-03 format. Now open that same doc and sheet you just saved in MS Office, version of your choice. What do you get? Word Salad or number hosing.

The fact they can get it to open at all is frankly a miracle but don't kid yourselves, the world uses MS Office for a REASON. it is because everyone has to share docs and sheets and PPTs with everyone else and that means compatibility. Now I'm sure some dude will chime in about how some doc he saw or heard about in 2004 didn't open right in MS Office to which I say, so what? for 99.9995% it "just works". I've had to deal with projects where I had Office 2K, 2K3, 2K4 for Mac, and 2K7 all collaborating on a 14Mb mess of a doc, the ONLY one who had trouble with it? The one kid trying to use open Office. We ended up getting him a copy of 2K3 just so we didn't have to deal, and sadly we'll see in 2 or 3 years the same in TFA.

This is a classic case of "penny wise pound foolish" as it'll cost them more in lost hours dealing with borked data than it would be just to buy the damned MS Office licenses, which they could probably get a discount on if their guy in charge of purchasing didn't suck.