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Switching From Microsoft Office To LibreOffice Saves Toulouse 1 Million Euros
jrepin sends this EU report:
The French city of Toulouse saved 1 million euro by migrating all its desktops from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. This project was rooted in a global digital policy which positions free software as a driver of local economic development and employment. Former IT policy-maker Erwane Monthubert said, "Software licenses for productivity suites cost Toulouse 1.8 million euro every three years. Migration cost us about 800,000 euro, due partly to some developments. One million euro has actually been saved in the first three years. It is a compelling proof in the actual context of local public finance. ... France has a high value in free software at the international level. Every decision-maker should know this."
I'll pass.
As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Try installing LibreOffice in America, and the users will whine, "why it not Microsoft????" They'll complain to your boss, you'll be fired and ostracized, and you'll have to learn French and relocate to France if you ever want to work again.
The French police seem to have had a good amount of success as well: http://www.zdnet.com/french-po...
There are probably always going to be use cases for the majority of users to be fine with Open or Libre office. Some specialized functionality in finance might merit excel. There is nothing I've found on Linux that easily replaces Visio or Project ( libre-project is fine for reading, but I've had many issues with creating them). It's what I use at home (lubuntu). At work, I do have to say I prefer Outlook/Exchange for integrated mail and calendar, but I could probably live without Word/Excel/PPT.
Here's to hoping Libreoffice and the other forks can continue to expand and refine their software.
I am interested in knowing what other costs have gone up and down. It's not really fair to post an article saying how much money a company is saving directly by migrating from Microsoft Office suite to LibreOffice; too much room for unfair bias. It would be more fair if they would show how they are saving that much money and the before and after of other seemingly non-related software.
I'm sure that the switch is actually saving money, but just curious about other expenses, that's all.
And how much time was lost from (1) employees needing to learn a new system, (2) reintegrating email onto a new client platform, and (3) finding a new way to conduct patching. (Microsoft, for all their deficiencies, is better than its competitors at keeping patches up-to-date. I'm looking at you, Apple.)
I'm not saying that the move may not be correct in terms of dollars and sense, but please answer these questions before blowing sunshine up my ass.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The exemptions were given because some Word macros and sophisticated Excel files could not be reproduced in LibreOffice or other open source productivity suites. These are examples of what Serp calls “some less mature features” in free software: “When it comes to making some kinds of presentations, for example, there is often a little extra to do [compared to the same process in PowerPoint]. So for some people the process is not so clear, and this can cause adaptability problems in everyday work.”
How about they use some of the saved money to either donate or contribute code to make the software work better?
Instead we have companies and other organizations making and saving tens of billions of dollars off Open Source(like Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Facebook, Twitter, Apple etc.) and then we end up with catastrophic security nightmares like HeartBleed because no one could be bothered to send a couple of bucks over to the overburdened couple of folks that everyone relies on for security. And then we have asshats on message boards like this one who likely never contributed to OpenSSL or looked at the code for bugs but feel entitled to call the coders stupid for the bugs after the fact.
This space for rent.
Sure you saved on paying NO licenses, but if none old stuff is compatible (formulas, formats), or you're functionality is limited (macros, embeds), or the feature plain sucks (track changes in Office > Libre), then how much more work are your employees doing? Likely more and you'll end up in a zero sum game.
Forgot, we're talking about France. Workers need something to do.
Offer them a payrise for not having MS Office, about 20% of the amount you've saved.
The real question is, what is the long term impact to productivity and work flow? Sure you can save money up front by switching to a different software suite but that doesn't matter if it disrupts your business in a significant way. Before the shouting starts I'm not implying that there is anything wrong. I'm would like to see an actual study done to determine the effect.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
thinking "libreoffice" was french-made.
> or you're functionality is limited, or the feature plain sucks
Our experience is the cost of limited functionality in off-the-shelf software is a significantly higher cost than the license cost.
With the old proprietary system, an employee would spend 4 hours each Friday copying and pasting from one program to another.
With the new modular open source software, I spent an hour authoring a module to completely automate the data transfer, and have it happen in real time.
For just that one little function alone, this year we saved 4 hours X 52 weeks X ~$40/hr = $8,320 per year.
I do one of those every week. A little change to the software for a big change in the process. I'd be surprised if we haven't saved at least $1 million / year total, from all the little tweaks, correction, and additions we've done to the open source software to make our process better, faster, more efficient, and more accurate. I know the P/L from the from the program using the open source stuff sure has improved, but it's hard to quantify how much of that is due to the software. I could easily prove it's saved at least as much as my salary though, and my salary was being paid when we had the proprietary software too, for a specialist who was paid to admin the system and figure out hacks to get the proprietary system to almost meet our needs using duct tape and bubble gum.
Of course, the employees probably already spend 2-3 hours/year dealing with the piece of shit that is Microsoft Office. They probably also devote some amount of IT time and resources to dealing with licensing and activation issues, additional troubleshooting associated with imaging and installation procedures, etc.
Actually, really, I'm not being fair. MS Office is not a piece of shit. It's a really good application, though the whole installation/licensing/activation thing can be a bit of a nightmare at times. LibreOffice is also a very good application that most people could use as their office suit without serious difficulties. Mostly people just get upset because people know it's free. The fact that it's cheap makes them think it's "cheap" in the sense of "flimsy" and "poor quality", so they resent being moved onto it. That seems to be the single largest issue, in my experience.
Funny, I say the same about MSO, Word in particular. For example, getting an image with caption where you want it is *still* a PITA in Word. In Writer, you have much more control and it's much clearer what's happening.
For me, Word is simply not worth its money. On the contrary: it costs the company more than its license. I'm more productive with LibreOffice. YMMV.
Unfortunately reality isn't that easy.
Support will take a hit.. Instead of hiring 10 cheap indians do do your so called support and reinstalls, you need to hire talented staff to handle this new and open source product which costs a lot in higher wages, training if any, etc..
People always neglect support and repairs..
Will they be donating any of that 1 million euros towards LibreOffice development?
Yep. I was explaining to an old-headed unix guy that I use Linux at home, and he didn't believe me, and called it cheap shit, etc., etc. (he railed against Linux, being an old school Unix guy), so I brought my laptop in and showed him, especially OpenOffice (this was a few years ago). He said he was surprised at how professional it seemed. All preconceived notions, which a five minute demo swept away.
Munich decided to move completely to Linux (so not only from MS Office on MS Windows to LibreOffice on MS Windows) 10 years ago and managed to complete the move last year. One of the main complaints of users seems to be lack of compatibility when exchanging documents with the MS world.
Now if more cities move to Open/LibreOffice, companies trading with them might have to produce more compatible documents and MS might finally loose its compatibility "strangle" on its user.
Do you want to save the changes to your document before surrendering?
For local government purposes the city is part of Toulouse Métropole (“Greater Toulouse”), which includes 37 neighbouring communities and has a total population of around 714,000. Toulouse Métropole employs some 10,000 staff to manage its administrative operations.
I don't know much about local government in the US or France. But that seems like a heck of a lot of administrators for that number of people.
Hello, how about savings or losses in productivity from having to convert all the documents or not being able to read stuff sent from other places who are insistant on MS Word?
I'm not saying I think this is stupid, bit, you have to look beyond the license costs if you want to convince people it's a good idea to switch. For me I just stick with Apache OpenOfice because I DO NOT NEED MS Word. I have Pages on the Mac as well, so I'm good.
Pine and telnet ?
In my experience email is the single biggest business tool. What are these people using?
I can only assume that job roles are becoming so very pigeon-holed now - and so very automated in function as to use an 'office suite' for document creation and a ticketing system / xMS underlying application for everything else. Including minimal email.
Is this where we (are) (heading), away from general email / collaboration of the old fashioned 'letter' and 'room booking' sense and into a semi-automatic process driven / management system. Everyone is a call centre employee with canned responses, deadlines and baron walls. Where you can't ping ideas (or novels!) back and forth, because they become tracked time-assets.
I suppose rather than an email client on our phones, we will have an integrated-work-tool.
Makes sense, I guess - perhaps Exchange / Outlook has run it's course. Perhaps there is another way. The transition of being able to do the things that Exchange /Outlook allow you to do is hard. I suspect many hardcore excel users won't find an alternative.
Not that I love MS Office. I just have it in my blood now. I have never found anything better than the Outlook / Exchange combo for outright business usage. (I'm not talking global mega corp I'm talking joe-business)
drunk.
Use rtf. Never had a problem swapping documents with this format.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You would have to define "centrally control the application".
If you mean "centrally control distribution", then the answer is yes. RH for instance uses repositories. Update the repository - the next time the specific host checks for updates it will get them.
And this wasn't possible in Office because of your incompetence? So its hard to argue that you're saving massive amounts of money when you clearly don't know how to work with the technology your users are using. Instead you forced everyone else to change because you were incapable of doing something.
Thats pretty stupid, certainly not something you should be bragging about.
Every Office app has had scriptable i/o since before LibreOffice was a thought in someones mind.
God I hate when you clueless fucks say something so stupid, it makes me end up defending Office, but every time someone like you speaks it just shows how incompetent you actually are.
The cost of an office license is less than the cost of one week of minimum wage per employee, wether you realize it or not its almost certain that it takes more time than that to adjust throughout the course of a year for any user who makes REGULAR use of office.
So basically, you're too inexperienced to know how to work with the tools you have and so instead you cost the company a fair amount per user to retrain because you, one person, was incompetent.
Again, this isn't something you want to brag about.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
But hey, it's Friday night and I'm happy for a good week, including the use of LibreOffice AND MS Office.
Yes MS Office is more polished, and yes hardly anyone uses the stuff LibreOffice doesn't have.
So below the line, for 99% of papers LibreOffice is a fine application.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Ran back to MS Office. LibreOffice corrupted files, added formatting that was not even present in the original, screwed up tables, could not tell the difference between a soft and hard page break.
A least with OpenOffice, only pagination gets screwed.
Simple eh?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can get a current copy of MS Word to read old MS Word documents, like OpenOffice can. Since Microsoft can't pull that off, I'm guessing you won't either. I suppose you could shellExecute(OpenOffice.exe) from a Word macro. :)
So yeah, you COULD throw out all your company's documents in order to avoid having two "power users" of Word learn different menu locations for a few things. That would make sense, if you had Balmer's dick in your mouth.
Also in Latin America where it's so easy to get a pirated copy of Microsoft and don't need to worry about getting in trouble for it. Why waste your time with an inferior product when you can get MS Office for free?
Whenever i hear of local councils (or any bureaucracy) claim that project X has saved $Y i am cautious. They have every incentive to fudge the numbers, and no one has an incentive to debunk them except MS (who no one will believe). I have no reason to doubt their claims, but a third-party audit would be nice.
I have heard of a few municipalities doing this now, perhaps some sort of coalition to exchange knowledge and coordinate development funding is warranted?
I usually have LibreOffice installed on my computers alongside MS Office. I find LibreOffice sluggish and not as responsive or as easy to use as MSO (although this might be a familiarity thing). I am one of those people who like the ribbon. Sometimes formatting doesn't come out properly as well. There is also the question of productivity.
Not a troll. I actually do use Libreoffice, both on Mac and on a Linux. However even for my very simple jobs, I often find Libreoffice has some bug I can't work around and I have to load up my pirated copy of MS Office, which actually works.
I keep using the open sores software based on some weird principle. It's fine (but not quite as good) for editing basic text documents.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
You know, very few people can claim to have actually met the guy that invented Get off my lawn!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Don't get me wrong- I've been primarily on Libreoffice and then Openoffice for several years now.
But I see no reason that you couldn't have automated the data transfer in the microsoft environment too. I've written programs both in VBA and in Openoffice Basic which implement that kind of functionality.
The significant challenge to the openoffice side is better integration with email an the calendar. It provides microsoft with a lot of lockin.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
He's clearly capable of doing the customizations. What he doesn't seem capable of doing is paying a company $500 per seat for exactly zero added value, paying them again every two years when they break compatibility to sell more commercial software, and then paying his employees again to fix what no longer works in the new version of the commercial software.
Sure - it can be done in Micosoft office too...
But it's about cost, not about this tiny functionality...
Why the hell would you pay for an full Microsoft office suite licence/site licences if you can do the same thing without all the costs?
But great job in trying to spin this into incompentence in stead of cost savings...
I have three questions.
1) LibreOffice still has the potential of royally messing up the formatting of Microsoft Office documents. It is fine if you print a recipe for mama, but my hands-on experience is that complex docs can get absolutely and completely whacked. Someone gets an Office file, modifies it with LO, sends it back. Then they receive the e-mail "hey buddy, everything looks wrong". What happens now?
2) How much of those €1M savings will be used to sponsor LibreOffice? Everyone who understands open source knows that it's not a free lunch. Extremely complex projects like this need paid developers if you want to make any meaningful progress. It's a cool 500k lines of code project.
3) Can we please hear a "status update" of these cities or governments switching to OSS? After a year or two, are they still on board? Is there a quiet switch back to Microsoft software?
>> How do you automate detection and deployment of important security updates
apt-get.
aaaaaaa
...that MS does security better ?
My counter-claim is that MS has even worse problems, we just cannot easily see them.
MS is mainly a US centred company and its support for foreign languages is poor. Consequently, Europe will be the place to escape from the vendor lock.
Now that you have managed to bring your karma back up enough that you are allowed to write an unlimited number of comments per day, at whatever frequency you like, will you finally stop using your sock puppet? Or are you going to continue to use it to lie about slashdot's personal "oppression" of you?
n/t
my current employer does not offer vacation for salaried employees. There is no PTO (paid time off) account to accrue vacation time. And the amount of time a salary employee is able to not show up to work is determine by that employee's direct manager.
Negotiation of vacation time wasn't possible in this case. The only alternative was to turn down the legitimate job offer, and lose unemployment benefits.