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25,000 Danish Hospital Staff Moving To LibreOffice

Posted by Soulskill on from the freeing-up-the-budget dept.

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."

4 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. LibreOffice vs OpenOffice by Kensai7 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    And it's important to notice they asked for LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. The really free version.

    --
    "Sum Ergo Cogito"
  2. whatever happened to by Osgeld · · Score: 3, Interesting

    software with a specific goal in mind, why is this medical system ran by excel and nothing else?

  3. Have they fixed spell checking yet? by c.r.o.c.o · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I am NOT trolling. Mod me whichever way you wish, but this is a real issue I had with Open Office that made me gave up on it. To put it simply, when running Open Office on a computer running Windows 7 32bit, the spell check would NOT work.

    Here are a few things I remember doing. I tried downloading several versions. I tried installing it both as a regular user AND as administrator. I tried deleting, adding and modifying dictionaries. I tried changing languages between different English variants. I tried changing permissions on executables. I even reinstalled Windows 7. I struggled for almost a week to make it work, reading manual pages and searching forums. In the end I gave up trying to fix it. Now here's the kicker though... I did find a way that would fix the issue temporarily. If I would browse to the install folder of Open Office, right click on swriter.exe and select "run as administrator", the spell check would work. So I know all the executables, java environment and dictionaries were in place, but somehow the permissions were wrong and unfixable.

    This happened around September of last year, when I was in the middle of my last year at university and I had a LOT of projects to complete. I had to almost live within SPSS and a word processor. Always using the workaround was a chore I did not need. So I completely gave up on OpenOffice and used my student discounts to buy OpenOffice's main competitor.

    I can't figure out what is the real point of this post. I suppose I'm just venting, wishing I could get that week of my life back. Oh yes, and sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

  4. Re:A more important reason by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1991 was 20 years ago. So you'd be looking at documents created in Word for Windows 2.0.

    If you want to open those files in Word 2010, you can follow the instructions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922849#w2010

    So if your requirement is ability to open files 20 years old, it seems like Microsoft Office does the trick.

    OpenOffice/LibreOffice can trace their roots back to StarOffice, and the version avaliable in 1991 was what, StarOffice 1.0?

    So the question is: Can Open/LIbreOffice open documents from StarOffice 2.0?

    If it CAN'T then that means that actually, your assertions is wrong in terms of which product to chose for backwards compatibility.