Valencia Region Government Completes Switch To LibreOffice

jrepin writes "The administration of the Spanish autonomous region of Valencia has completed its switch to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity applications. Last week Friday the region's ICT department announced that the office suite is installed on all of the 120,000 desktop PCs of the administration, including schools and courts. The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licenses."

Comments

The migration will save the government some 1.5 m

[Defenestrar]

But what's the cost in special training and support? Anyone got a reasonable number for the ROI?

Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5

[somersault]

as far as that goes has anybody done a Ribbon Interface pack for LO??

All I can think is: why?

Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5

[Bert64]

This idea that moving away from MS will cost millions in training is FUD spread by MS to discourage such migrations...
There are many cases where upgrading to the latest MS offering is actually a more significant change than switching to an alternative, for instance moving from msoffice 2003 to 2007 is a bigger leap than going from 2003 to libreoffice as the user interface is entirely different.

In reality many such migrations have been performed, often with no training being provided whatsoever. Users are just expected to get on with it, and generally do.

Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5

[luis_a_espinal]

This is different to the upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because of what?

Exaaaaactly. It's like some people in /. have no clue as of the ridiculously unnecessary training costs that Office 2007 introduced. MS Office till v2003 set a paradigm of usage, an operational lingua franca of sorts that most people using MS products knew rather well.

It worked. It was fine, and people were efficient with it. There was no reason to change the UI paradigms considering that:

1 - MS Office 2007 did not introduce significant functionality changes, and

2 - the UI changes are not truly needed to use new functionality missing from previous versions.

In other words, fuck you Microsoft for violating the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it."

Migrating from Office 2003 to Libreoffice constitutes a smaller cost in training and compatibilty than the move to Office 2007.

Indeed as well. I'm not a LibreOffice fan, but I know that a person well-versed in MS Office 2003 can make the leap quite easily to LibreOffice.

The reality is that MS Office users have continuously been struggling to use MS Office 2007 and newer. Let us do a google for usage questions regarding MS Office 2007. That it was released eons ago (in internet years) and that people still struggle with it, that is an indictment in the whole UI change malarkey.

Companies are forced to waste money in retraining or in loss of productivity by users that have to constantly google for ways to do shit the were able to do with their eyes closed for over a decade. The whole counter-argument of LibreOffice retraining costs is completely bogus considering that you will have to retrain or lose productivity the moment you go to Office 2007 or newer.

Re:The migration will save the government some 1.5

[Ngarrang]

They will now be teaching LibreOffice in all of those schools, not MS Office. Thus, in Valencia, no future Valencian employees in the government will require any new training.