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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."
Come for the beer; stay for the freedom.
--
BMO
And it's important to notice they asked for LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. The really free version.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
software with a specific goal in mind, why is this medical system ran by excel and nothing else?
I hope that they're going to use SOME of that savings to hire a programmer or two to help improve LibreOffice. In Denmark, of course. Might as well keep the work local and focus on local requirements.
Why not just name it? Repeating "proprietary office suite", over and over, just makes the author sound like an fool.
#DeleteChrome
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...
Don't worry. The US company will offer low rent just to stop the idea from spreading.
If that fails they will call in the State Dept.
Words will be had with the gov and a list of troublemakers presented. People who pushed for 'free' will get new jobs, be offered packages or new safe positions well away from the stress of buying software.
A new cost saving deal will done the new staff and US exports will be safe again.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Dagens Medicin, a news site for local and regional administrations, quotes Thomsen explaining that most of the hospital workers, doctors and nurses, will have little trouble using Libre Office. "Most of them do not need the advanced features of these suites."
More important than thatt, 20 years from now they'll be able to open the documents they create today.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Compare the focus of http://www.godmad.dk/ with http://www.isgodmad.com/ and you'll that the Danish takes thing more calmly.
While I think this is good news, I wanted to say, generally, that I think IBM Lotus symphony is far better than other OO.org variants. I'm quite amazed that people don't really seem to consider it. If you've not tried it, you really should. It was also recently donated to the Apache foundation. But the most important think, I think is that it's actually the first office suite I've used in a long time that feels like it offers a compelling alternative to MA office, not only that it is as good where it masters, but that it is actually better in some regards.
I wish they'd get it out as the default in big distros, actually.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
A new cost saving deal will done the new staff and US exports will be safe again.
I think that's what happened in Germany, when their foreign office dropped Linux. It was working rather well, but words were had and the experiment dropped.
(There was also a political shift to a party that favoured the profits of their friends in business over the costs borne by the people).
Now what the Libre Office guys need to do is wander up to them and say, "You're saving 40 million Kroner in licensing fees. But is there anything in LO that doesn't meet your standards? Because for a tiny fraction of those savings we'd be happy to fix the problem right away."
When your entire company will operate without MS Office i would have to say that this issue is not going to come up for general staff. (LO uses odf not doc.)
I would think .odf's features would already be implemented in MSO so converting for external use is not terrible.
Im calling you a 'M$ Ninja![!!!]' for trying to convince everyone that this is actually an issue with no simple work around.
Denmark is very Microsoft oriented, our former prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen even visited Steve Ballmer in Redmond.
A move away from Microsoft product is very hard, the usual management argument is either: "Worlds biggest software company surely must have the best product!" or "Worlds most sold Office package must be best!" combined with the fact that nearly every business uses either Dynamics AXA or Dynamics NAV (or some former versions of those two) makes any changes next to impossible.
This is btw. second big move away from MS Office in the health sector, "Region Midtjylland" did this a couple of years ago. Several municipalities has also moved either everything or just the education.
Not only that, but if they do need to show a document to some other party, just export it to PDF.
while, big business can use emacs, for what it's worth, hospitals in denmark, probably need an easy way to produce odf, as it's official standard for denmarks government bodies and lot of documentation flow for hospitals is with government.
libre office does that, so they can cut expenses on software rather than, say patient care or staff salary.
On the other hand, ODF is the only approved editable format for use by the Danish government (citation: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2010/02/02/denmark-adopts-odf-and-pdfa-40016263/) in which case your compatibility will actually be better with LO than with MSO.
Remember these are Danish hospitals, in a country with state funded healthcare... ODF and PDF is what they require compatibility with, not any proprietary garbage... It is actually businesses using MSO who will be at a disadvantage when trying to do business with the government, because MS has extremely half-assed ODF support. So you have the situation backwards, the cost of MSO + the cost of dealing with its poor compatibility with everything else, vs the cost of LO.
Also the article mentions they are using a virtual desktop infrastructure, whereby they log in on a dumb terminal and a VM server somewhere fires up a desktop image for them and exports the display to their terminal. Now if you consider their requirements, any of those users who don't require any proprietary windows software can be given a linux image with the same software, thus saving the hospital the cost of windows licenses too.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I think you'll find that "GIMP" is far, far worse.
Is MSO's export to ODF any better than its export to HTML was, back at the turn of the century? For that matter, can today's MSO produce HTML that can be edited and maintained?
I cannot answer that since I moved all my document production to Star Office at the end of the last century, then OpenOffice, now LibreOffice. The experience of moving out of the Microsoft ecology into the realm of native ODF tools has been one of freedom, and most notably freedom from hidden constraints.
Microsoft has often released code whose sole purpose was to let them put some feature on a sales brochure, such as "Can export to HTML." That did not mean that every document from MSO could be successfully exported, nor did it mean than any document would be exported in a reasonable format. It simply meant that the sales rep who was talking to your PHB had been trained to demonstrate the feature, possibly with explicit instructions to avoid documents that contained certain features.
When dealing with Microsoft, one has to recognize that its goal has never been to produce quality products; its goal has always been to maximize its profits. That means there is no incentive to make things any better than they need to be to close the sale. This is especially true for features that might increase the risk of a customer escaping the Microsoft ecology.
Will
So you are telling me there are NO insurance companies in Denmark? No claims, no adjusters, nobody to interact with but the government? Must be candyland to have everything work without a single interaction with the outside world.
odf is the Danish government standard for documents, when a company wants to communicate with government entities using a Word Processor format (that's not the same as a document like pdf) then they can comply with the law of the land.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Just by using it they're supporting it. They bring legitimacy to LibreOffice that OOo's been trying to achieve since its inception. All those managers who scoffed at the idea of using non-MS Office software because "it's not Microsoft, and in business everyone uses Microsoft" will take pause. When they need to trim the budget, they may remember reading some story about saving millions by going with LibreOffice. They may talk about it with their golf buddies.
Every large business that relies on LibreOffice is one less large business paying an unnecessary tax to Microsoft for software functionality that is extremely dated. Office is one of the most overpriced pieces of software on the market and it maintains that price by leveraging compatibility and this perception that a business has to use Microsoft to be taken seriously. OOo and its forks are taking care of the compatibility with OpenDocument and support for Word -- it's businesses that take the plunge and actually use the software that will take care of the perception problem. So just by using the software, they're supporting it. Doing so publicly supports FOSS even more.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Because unless the Danes ONLY do business with the government
It looks like they are single payer.
Cheap storage VM.
ODF is an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006). Of course governments are going to use it! It's not the government controlling the free market.
Microsoft can happily make a word processor that reads and writes ISO/IEC 26300:2006 and compete. Unfortunately they thought it more easier simply to bribe the ISO committee into making their own proprietary format an ISO standard. Something that has never happened to ISO before. In cases of document formats it's the free market corrupting the system and forcing minor players out of the market.