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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."

19 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Stroking a blow! by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Come for the beer; stay for the freedom.

    --
    BMO

  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?

    1. Re:whatever happened to by MacTO · · Score: 3, Informative

      I've maintained corporate systems which relied heavily upon specialized software, and virtually none of the employees needed an office suite for the official business functions. Yet they insisted upon using such software to jot down quick notes or make quick calculations. Things that they really could have used calculator or notepad for, but they were more productive using the office suite (if for no other reason than they weren't wasting their and our time complaining about it).

      I could easily imagine that being the case here. After all, if the hospitals' operations depended upon that proprietary office suite, it would be a bugger to switch to LibreOffice.

    2. Re:whatever happened to by Zironic · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's pretty much what the article says. They have 25,000 computers, currently 10,000 of them have Office since only a subset of the staff have any need of the software. However when changing to virtual desktops, they'd be required to buy another 15,000 licences according to their vendor, so they said fuck no.

    3. Re:whatever happened to by Dominic · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Except that getting doctors to run hospitals is completely stupid. They are massively more expensive than managers, and when you do medicine at university you tend to learn how to treat people, not run businesses. That's not to say that *appropriate* managers aren't doctors (people such as clinical directors), but if you think that doctors are the best people to decide which printer paper supplier to use, or the logistics company that is responsible for transporting samples around the country, or the million other things that running a multi-million pound business (which is what a hospital is), then you are severely misguided.

      Only 3% of NHS staff are managers. That is lower than pretty much any company in the oh-so-efficient private sector. The NHS is also the most efficient healthcare system of seven top industrialised nations: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10375877

      You, sir, are a right-wing troll. I suggest sticking to facts in your future posts.

  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...

    1. Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      I think that everybody here knows that submitting OOo bugs is an absolute waste of time. Guess what? You still can't group images properly, Impress doesn't wrap links, and to rotate an image in writer you have to open Draw to fix it and then paste it back into writer. FFS, Impress froze just then when I tried to create a new presentation to see if link wrapping is finally fixed! I know I should be *fixing* these bugs rather than just complaining about them, but who honestly has the time to familiarise themselves with the massive OOo/Libreoffice code base just to fix something so trivial that it should have been fixed years ago?

    2. Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      I had this problem and tracked it down to the document not registering the language. The only way I found to consistently fix it was to highlight all the text and then right click in the bottom centre information bar which displays the language - it'll be blank - and select the language of choice! Good luck.

    3. Re:Have they fixed spell checking yet? by impaledsunset · · Score: 3, Informative

      Try reporting it against LibreOffice then, another management, another attitude towards bug reports. It's much more likely that your issue will be fixed, and by the way that's one of the reasons why LibreOffice is a good idea – fixing what's wrong with OpenOffice.org.

  4. A more important reason by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)

  5. Re:Stroking a blow! by wrook · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

  6. Re:Stroking a blow! by nzac · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  7. Re:Stroking a blow! by tacet · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Stroking a blow! by Bert64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!
  9. Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. The really free version

    OpenOffice is not free? According to Google, it is Open Source (and see the new Google Best Guess feature...).
    I don't want to be the devil's advocate, but whatever one may think about Oracle, it isn't fair to tell OpenOffice is not free.

    --
    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  10. Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice by RobbieThe1st · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Note that LibreOffice added a whole set of packages(go-oo) that were not in OpenOffice due to people being unwilling to assign copyright to Sun. So, yes, by day 1 it was *magically* better and more free(as not all copyrights are owned by the controlling interest, it's nearly impossible to change the license in the future).

  11. Re:LibreOffice by lucidlyTwisted · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think you'll find that "GIMP" is far, far worse.

  12. Re:LibreOffice vs OpenOffice by WorBlux · · Score: 3, Informative

    OO required copyright assignment. LO doesn't

  13. Re:Stroking a blow! by LingNoi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So it IS the government saying "fuck the free market!" and trying to ram through formats.

    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.