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.

Comments

Re:Libre Office

[TWX]

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.

Oh, the horror~~~

[DrYak]

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.

Open source is not always the best option

[DidgetMaster]

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.

Re:Sounds like an ad

[Lumpy]

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.