Slashdot Mirror
Italian City To Dump OpenOffice For Microsoft After Four Years
An anonymous reader writes: Between 2011 and 2014, the municipality of Pesaro, Italy, trained up its 500 employees to use OpenOffice. However, last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365. According to a report from Netics Observatory (Google translation of Italian original), the city administration will be able to save up to 80% of the software's total cost of ownership by going back. The savings are largely due to the significant and unexpected deployment costs. In particular, having to repaginate and tweak a number of documents due to a lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems translated into a considerable waste of time and productivity. The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
I've worked on a state office migration project before, it's no surprise for me that this kind of efforts always end up with the same outcome. The thing is that migrating a state office is a painful process, and tends to generate discomfort on many people, from the office workers to the technical staff.
Here in latin america we may have particular problems regarding that.
Many office employees don't want to fully disclose their working environment because: oh surprise! they hardly do any work at all! They just sit there in their computer and complain when their favourite radio stream which uses proprietary technology from the 90's. I wonder how much of these "propietary files" were actually mail-forwarded .ppt/mp4 files and flash games.
Technical staff has to be trained, and usually that doesn't go well, they are not cooperative and feel the migration process as a personal attack on their capacity and skills.
It doesn't help either that internal politics get involved in the process when some office workers think they're being audited, and actively seek to shut down the migration process through political means (which they usually have way more experience than the guys doing the migration work).
Overall the employees feel migration processes as a unnecessary burden, an attack to their perceived right to do what they please with the state's resources without answering anyone and a challenge to their competence. It also prevents high-ranking bureaucrats to get all those juicy commisions from propietary software vendor's.
For some things it won't help.
We use numerous highly-customized document templates that simply don't like anything except MS Office, and have occasionally had problems over the years even with MS Office and problems as features are tweaked by Microsoft.
Part of the problem is that users that are extremely proficient with MS Office do not want to change, much like users that were extremely proficient with WordPerfect didn't want to change either.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Besides:
Excel (various macros used on tens of files)
Tens of files ? Oh my god that is sooooo many.... Hercules himself would be needed to sort through all of them.
And from the /. summary:
The management estimates that every day roughly 300 employees had to spend up to 15 minutes each sorting out such issues.
15 minute per employee ? That's so horribly long, it's almost as long as their daily coffee pause! They have surely logged tons of overtime because of this! Unpaid overtime! The Italian economy is crumbling because of the daily 15minutes it takes to fix a malformet .docx import into OpenOffice.org !!!
~~~
I can't decide if this is a disguised parody.
Or if Microsoft have decided to advertise *how easy* it is to actually switch to even an out-dated alternative like OpenOffice.org (not to mention that LibreOffice.org is getting more development and much more bugfixes)
15 minutes per day ? and 10 Excel file needing fixing ? Common, sound's like it's actually even easier than a major upgrade of MS Office itself.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I didn't say that it didn't matter, I said that it was happening. The source of the news is irrelevant. You're right that the price of Office365 probably played a role but I'm not so sure it played a significant one. After all, Microsoft are competing against free.
Some people seem to be under the impression that free software is always a better choice than proprietary software. Some of the stuff released as open source software is garbage and there is often little or no incentive for those who wrote it to fix it. There is also a lot of good stuff out there with wide community support as well. I have used a lot of open source AND proprietary software and there is a lot of good and bad stuff in both camps. It is amazing to me how many people will spend many hours and extra training costs in order to get something working just so they don't have to spend $20 for a license to something else that works a lot better. If I find some really good software and the guys who built it want $50 from me for their efforts, I am happy to pay it. My time is worth something.
It is so bad, its alleged "open" "standard" OO-XML has binary cruft in the spec. The spec basically says "whatever the old MS-Word did with this binary is the standard". Even Microsoft is not able to come up with a reference implementation that does not depend the ability to execute the original MS-Word6 binary buried under several layers of emulation.
This is the real way to build a cash cow. No one else can paginate the way old Ms-Word6 binary did. And if you inveigle your customers into incorporating that pagination as the essential part of their process, then you can laugh at them, tell them you are going to squeeze till they yelp, and they can do anything about it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Fuckin' I've worked in a LARGE governmental organization that made 2 format switches and you know what they have that most businesses don't?
A shit ton of documents, dating back YEARS
So you're not just dancing around with a version or three out of software X, you're plumbing the depths with garbage from 15+ years ago and god only knows what level of mess. I don't like Microsoft OR its formats but what costs actual money, taxpayer money, is having some manager somewhere tell you what you need to support and have it cost nothing to make the switch, by the way these documents need to be accessible to the public by the way these documents need to be accessible to law enforcement by the way by the way by the way
After you throw enough cash in the money hole a dim light flickers to life that reads "married to a format 4 life" or several million dollars of up front investment beyond rollout / maintenance costs for your staff.
THE MOST impacted area of migration to any document format are the documents, the people are transient and replaceable by comparison
So for ppl who don't get why this is something to pay attention to (i.e. news) or don't get what the big problem is, work with a giant documentation warehouse full of various aging electronic formats
...300 people @ 15 minutes a day, after it was 500 employees total in the organization. It's utter bullshit that 60% of the staff are involved in document production every day, much less so much that just the tweaking was 15 minutes.
It's the exact smell of the bullshit I've seen for 25 years every time an IT department had already made a decision and made up numbers to justify it. Generally, they come up with the money number by working backwards and hope that nobody knows the internal workflows well enough to critique it. But this one fails when we only have one other number to work with, it's so over-the-top.
Then I remembered that Italy is the place that proves Donald Trump really could win: Berlusconi is Trump mixed with Rupert Murdoch and won election. It's the second most corrupt country in western Europe after Greece.
This switch was probably just bought and paid for.
The Italian city of Padua has been using libreoffice for many years. No Microsoft licences have been bought nor they will be in the foreseeable future. Maybe we have better employees.
Because microsoft gave them unlimited free use licenses for 5 years.
And they will have the exact same problems, as Office 365 has huge incompatabilities with a lot of older word docs as well as spreadsheets, etc...
It's a BS article trying to spin the fact that Microsoft caved in and gave the city a lot of free to ge tthem to switch back.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.