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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."
It won't just save it 1.5 now, it'll save that every upgrade cycle.
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as far as that goes has anybody done a Ribbon Interface pack for LO??
All I can think is: why?
which is totally what she said
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.
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This is different to the upgrade from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because of what? Migrating from Office 2003 to Libreoffice constitutes a smaller cost in training and compatibilty than the move to Office 2007.
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.
Open source office suites are like Chinese knock-offs. They may look similar to the real deal from the outside but once you start working intensively with them they start to degrade quickly.
Not really. I've used MSOffice for over 10 years. I've done so much technical writing that I know pretty much everything there is to know about MS word. Not so much with excel and the rest of the package.
Since I do my work in linux I decided to make the switch to libre office six months ago. With 3.x I was less than impressed, I even stated so a few times on /. posts related. Even saying that libre office will never compete with ms office in the work place.
With the release of 4.1, I'm not so sure any more, at least where it comes to writer vs word. There are still come compatibility issues between the two that needs to be worked out, especially in the area of file compatibilities. With that being said there is a lot of power in writer.
When I'm being forced to work in word now I'm actually wishing I could be back in writer. Over all I like the interface to libre writer better than I do the ribbons in word. I'm at the point in my life where I'm thinking about my next career choice. Making a serous attempt at writing is possibility. I've already chosen to do most of my writing in libre write.
While libre office still has a way to go before it can take the crown from office. But if I was office I would be looking over my shoulder because I'm starting to think libre office might pull it off.
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