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UK Government May Switch from MS Office to Open Source
New submitter Karashur sends this report from The Guardian:
"Ministers are looking at saving tens of millions of pounds a year by abandoning expensive software produced by firms such as Microsoft. Some £200m has been spent by the public sector on the computer giant's Office suite alone since 2010. The Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude believes a significant proportion of that outlay could be cut by switching to free 'open-source' software, such as OpenOffice, or Google Docs. 'I want to see a greater range of software used, so civil servants have access to the information they need and can get their work done without having to buy a particular brand of software. In the first instance, this will help departments to do something as simple as share documents with each other more easily. But it will also make it easier for the public to use and share government information.'"
Surely privacy issues prevent the use of GoogleDocs? Libreoffice on the other hand could save them a lot of money.
For actually doing office work, Microsoft stuff is hard to beat. Maybe it'll turn out great though, who knows.
Any savings, of course, would be offset by the unproductivity of "tens of millions" of government workers who can't seem to get their open-source office software to "just work the way it always has" over the next 5 years.
I can't get Microsoft Office to "just work the way it has".
...and normally appears to be the Government trying to force Microsoft to discount its licensed to the UK Government or invest in the latest boondoggle.
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Its taken them years to understand they actually have a choice and can save UK taxpayers a huge amount of money and have a better safer system. Let's hope they don't mess it up.
Take the very successful example of Munich:
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-munich-rejected-steve-ballmer-and-kicked-microsoft-out-of-the-city/
The original article doesn't even make this mistake: it just says that Docs can handle ODF. Nice summarizing, Karashur.
Sounds like your plain old customer "renegotiation" where they ask the vendor to lower prices. Have no fear - I would bet solid money that Office stays preinstalled on any UK Govt builds.
Only question is how much money they can save by threatening to leave. The UK government of cronies (doing their best to improve on US-style cronyism) would not benefit from any vendor graft if the vendor doesn't ever get paid, would they?
No danger of anything happening here as long as UK government is still for sale (Vote of no confidence? That's not remotely possible anymore given the Tory/Lib alliance charter).
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Yea just read. They aren't moving to Open Source, looks like they are moving to "anything but Microsoft" Big difference.
In that case, you want to first switch your mandated file format from MS's doc(x)/xls(x) to ODF's odt/ods. Then you can use MS Office, or switch to a new (possibly open-source, possibly even Free Software) office suite as you prefer.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
The owner of the company I work for hates Microsoft with a passion, around 1/2 our office computers are now Mac's.
we have tried openoffice, officelibra etc. However the problem is they aren't 100% compatible, there is always formatting issues, colour issues, and in some instances data just went missing.
in the End, the owner gave in, and purchased office for MAC for all the machines, and also all the pc's. Unless something has massively changed in the last several months i can see this been a great waste of time and money.
With the amount of time it takes to get things done in government as it is, this is only going to slow them down even more.
I think you'll find that the UK Government (or GCHQ at least) are responsible for more than their fair share of the spying. There's been pretty much a free flow of traffic between GCHQ and the NSA by all accounts.
I'll stick with the rattling MS's cage to see if some discounts shake loose theory. I very much doubt the cost of retraining and stripping out customised solutions built on top of MS Office will be less than the savings moving to Open Source.
What is more interesting is the Cabinet Office banning (excpet under 'expcetional' circumstances) all IT projects billing more than £100M - in order to stop them being locked into a few big integrators. You never know, perhaps they'll start delivering IT projects that are semi-functional and only a factor two over budget - that would be a real improvement.
The city of Freiburg in Germany embarked on a migration to OpenOffice.org and failed terribly while another German city -- Munich -- announced that the success of its open source migration had netted savings around $13 million. Partial migration / mixed environments seem to be a very bad idea.
Every time a government anywhere in the world decides to threaten a drop of Microsoft software you can bet that their seat license agreements are coming up for renewal. And the threats to migrate are only a ploy to cut a better deal. You can bet the Microsoft rep has already been authorized to sweeten the coffers of some politicians pet riding fund raising or do what ever is necessary to very quickly ensure that the by the time a real decision is taken that MS office and MS server products are the ones the government chooses. Same thing here in Canada, but with our government the decision to go all MS is a forgone conclusion there is no such thing as "looking for alternatives to save money", we just contract out every service possible and kill off labour unions like the CUPE instead and spec that contractors use nothing but MS office and server software compatible with existing government servers. We, unlike Great Britain have public money to burn now that Harper has gutted government services and pushed just about everything out to contract.
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I've been using the Ribbon format for about 3 years now and I STILL hate it. The newer versions of Outlook are the worst - the combination of the ribbon and the way MS couldn't be bothered to reimplement the compact header format really eat up vertical screen space for those of us who prefer the bottom preview pane layout (yes I know I can hide the ribbon but then I lose all the buttons which do what I use all the time, which is mainly the quick search box). On a laptop with only 768 vertical pixels (when I'm not docked) that is a serious headache which leaves me using OWA instead of the full blown outlook usually.
As you point out, the 2003->2007+ switch was therefore a huge opportunity for OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whichever fork is your favourite. The UI is great, easy to understand and the small differences from Office 2003 (like where the cursor ends up mid-editing a formula in Excel) are actually mostly positive incremental steps. You theoretically get the usability benefits of 2007+ (particularly for Excel, where memory/size constraints in 2003 were getting to be a problem for many).
Unfortunately though, interoperability is extremely poor - LibreOffice simply can't handle a big Excel spreadsheet (which is in my experience at least 60% of what most businesses buy Office for), and I've sent docx files from LibreOffice where, when people open them in MS Word, all the line breaks are suddenly gone or other formatting oddities appear. As another example, trying to use LibreOffice's "track changes" equivalent functionality left me with a docx file that Word (and often LibreOffice itself) is unable to open.
I would love to think that if the UK Government does move to LibreOffice they would fund someone to provide decent support who can fix a lot of these issues - that is supposed to be how the model works and fixing these issues would be of huge benefit to everyone. Unfortunately I can't really see that happening. I suspect instead it will end up being a typical government cock-up and massively overspend/under-deliver. I just hope that people don't end up viewing "Open Source" as the problem reason as it will be nothing to do with that and entirely to do with yet another display of civil service incompetence.
It's too bad my mod points just ran out, or you'd have had one for being insightful.
The important thing is the data. Open formats matter, and if there aren't suitable open formats available yet for the data you need to work with, creating additional open formats matters. The specific tools you use to access data that is stored in open formats are much less important.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Actually, now I've read the article, that's what the Minister is saying. Move to open formats first.
That will make it possible to switch software later, if they choose to. But even if the government doesn't, it will allow the people they work with to use their own choice of software, and prevents lock-in. Using MS Office becomes a choice, and can be selected (or dropped) on its merits, rather than being suffered out of necessity.
It's the BBC article and the /. summary which try to make it look like this is purely about switching software.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
The switch to Linux is not about open office. The simple reality is that most people create very basic documents and don't need much more than a basic text editor with fonts and spell check. Most enterprise software is now web based and thus all the average government machine needs is a web browser. So paying for a Windows license an a word license for a zillion machines that don't need either is just throwing money into the toilet. Plus once you dip your machine into the OSS world people often find that all kinds of commercial software needs can be replaced. Email systems, scheduling systems, VPNs, etc.
While there will be a handful of machines that need to remain windows I suspect that it would be significantly less than 1% and even then they will be in clusters such as an accounting office.
But some of the greatest advantages of OSS is that you no longer have an onerous license audit problem. Basically you point to your dozen accountants hold up a dozen 5 year old MS licenses and tell the auditors to go to hell as you don't even plan on upgrading office for another 5-10 years.
As one government official said directly to Bill Gates, OSS gave them freedom from Gates himself.
What I can't wait to laugh at are all the MS white papers that claim that this will somehow cost the UK more money than they presently spend on MS software. Quite simply these white papers are driven by the hysterical realization that the MS business model of taxing governments and businesses worldwide is nearing an end. People now have realistic options.
But the tears will be even more real as many governments and enterprises the world round will be dumping MS not out of a desire to save money but a desire to keep their computers from being spied upon by US entities.
If you want a feature in Open Office, fund it. Better yet, considering the cost of Microsoft Office, put the funding of Open Office in the annual budget. Rather than giving $100 million a year to Microsoft, give $10 million a year to Open Office. With a programming / total-expenditures ratio of 1, open source funding is efficient.
*disclaimer: former Msft office guy here*
The standard of use for MS office is Libreoffice, then it is obvious that the government will save on licensing costs, however those who use MS office in an enterprise environment as large as the government do not use Office simply as a suite of applications. Office is a software platform that connects with many line of non-MS business systems. Think plugins and addons on steroids. The engineering effort by vendors, in house IT, and analysts to convert all these things would be hugely disruptive.
Sure it fine to introduce choice for less sophisticated offices, but to mandate LibreOffice or any other product, commercial or otherwise is bad procurement practice. Licensing is chump change relative to the larger personnel & ecosystem costs.
The ribbon also changes state depending on what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, this would be helpful if icons, etc were recognizable, but many are not. Menus, etc, ate stateless and are always in the same place. Shortcut keys are easy to memorize. With the ribbon I found myself looking for icons and actions that were there a few minutes ago, still apply, but are now somewhere else.
To me the amazing thing is that within the Conservative Party (the dominant partner in the UK's coalition government, and usually presented by the press as anti-liberal, antediluvian, small minded and exclusively self-interested or overly class conscious) there are people who do sincerely believe in small government and the duty to spend tax income prudently. Some of these people have achieved minsterial office and are trying to put into practise what they believe and propound. I find it reassuring and entirely positive that they arrive at the point of advocating Free(dom) Software and decline to simply concur with the payment of hundreds of millions of our money to (mostly foreign) businesses for no public benefit or advantage.
It's a shame and a scandal that the "left-wing" and "liberal" representatives and parties have failed to realise that being bonded to unethical, solely profit driven (and mostly foreign) corporations does nothing for the public purse or the public good.
We had 13 years of supposedly liberal left wing government and the result was that we approached being bankrupt, handed over billions of tax pounds to greedy banks and foreign corporations for no result, fought wars that only benefited foreign powers and a handful of greedy politicians, and gave up rights bought in blood such as habeus corpus, jury trial and control of our own borders. The idea that the Conservative Party could be the UK's leading proponent of sound financial sense and a pragmatic and ethical approach to government IT purchasing and practise is almost enough to make me wonder if I took a lot of acid in the 60s or alkalines in the 70s but there it is, they are actually doing it, and for entirely rational reasons.
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My wife is a corporate accountant for a large city in New Zealand. I've asked her about this as she uses Excel every day and has used OO/LO at home on occasion (a while back). She says they use so many third-party reporting plugins that work with Excel that a switch to a FS option would be nearly impossible. Word may be crap but Excel will rule the bean-counter world for the time being.
The main bit of software councils need to wean themselves off of is SAP. My jaw nearly hit the floor when I found out the seat license cost for that (I've forgotten the exact amount and am not waking her to find out), and any individual of a company that runs it who enters their own timesheets must hold a seat license, even if that's the only thing they use a computer for in the firm. We're talking thousands of dollars per seat here, not dozens.