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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.
For some product
That is a message for new organizations to start with open standards from day 1. Otherwise you will get so dependent on proprietary standards that moving out of them may never be worth again.
I am an editor of sorts. My coworkers all use MSWord 2010, and the formatting gets thrashed every time they pass a document around. Inevitably I am called to fix it, and do so by opening it in LibreOffice.
Furthermore, I would argue that retraining everybody to Microsoft's cloud docs itself constitutes "a considerable waste of time and productivity", but I guess whoever in Pesaro's IT department that got under-the-table money disagrees.
From TFA:
They didn't replace MSOffice in the first place, they had a hybrid solution, which was costly, due to compatibility issues. They should have been able to know that beforehand. msoffice doesn't play well with others, it doesn't even implement any standard format. If you absolutely need to use msoffice in some spots, you should forget about interoperating, and just use msoffice everywhere.
If they switch to anything it should be Libre Office.
Unfortunately they are getting sucked back into Microsoft products. Very sad, considering that they had already broken free of it's stranglehold.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
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.
Next year they'll announce they're going back to LibreOffice due to the 15 minutes being spent every day for 300 employees to repaginate documents as they move to Microsoft Office
LibreOffice has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than OpenOffice does. In fact, it has much better compatibility with MSOffice documents than MSOffice does; everything in my office routinely gets fucked up by Office 2010.
But I agree with your fundamental premise. Why deal with a "veritable fuckfest of reformatting, repaginating, fucked up graphics, etc" when you can just use LibreOffice and not have to deal with whatever stupid updates that Microsoft foists on you this month?
LibreOffice won the developers so it gets many more fixes
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?...
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 ]
Use Libre Office. Never had any formatting problems going to MS word, any version. Going the other direction, formatting nightmares because people don't know how to format a file properly in MS word, let alone save it in the best file format. MS office "standards" are a joke. And last but not least, do you really want your governments sensitive information saved on a foreign corporations servers? I know i don't.
The problem is people are dealing with MS Office and they still try to do MS Office stuff in Openoffice or Libreoffice. I have no problem using Libreoffice in my environment because we don't use anything Microsoft to have compatibility problems at my workplace.
Maybe they should have used LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice, then. Of course, if the city had standardized on OO (or even LO), wouldn't the compatibility issue (ie re-paginating), be on the receiver's end, not the city's? Something sounds odd about this, at least the way it is being spun. Then again, Microsoft is involved...
Any experiences on WPS Office for Linux? Better or worse than LibreOffice?
That Microsoft paid for the report that found its' product the better fit...shocking...
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
...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 absence of a serious alternative to MS Access or easy/documemnted scripting [via macros] and VBA, as found in Excel is a non starter for me.
There are plenty of alternatives to MS Access unless you have some peculiar requirement that it be shipped to you in an office suite. Kind of ridiculous that you think it should be a clone of MS Office. Personally I use Filemaker when I'm going with proprietary small databases but there are plenty of open source options too.
As for macros LibreOffice Calc has fairly robust macro capability. It doesn't use VBA but so what? If you have tied yourself to Excel with a bunch of VBA scripts then you're probably stuck with Excel unless you want to do a lot of coding. Probably not good planning to hog tie yourself with proprietary technology but I know a lot of people do it with Excel+VBA.
LibreOffce or Open Office just do not cut it!
That's funny. I've standardized my company on LibreOffice and it works great for us. Been using it exclusively for 5 years now without problems. Not the right solution for everyone but it works great for us.
A single city alone cannot win.
Need National government, State governments, and all cities to all mandate only ODF files will be accepted for business with those entities. Then leave it to each to pick the best tools.
There may always be a need for true MS-Office - put 1 license on a remote server and let people RDP into it. It needs to be painful. Oh - and while you are at it - dump MS-Windows so people just just pirate a copy and install it on their systems.
People hate change. It is always a hassle. The first question asked is "why can't we do it the same way we've always done it?" That worked. That is there perception, not the truth. There are many problems working with MS-office, but they just don't remember those anymore. They've worked around each, one at a time over the last 25 yrs.
I still have issues with libreoffice and msoffice fucking up pagination and the like, or msoffice printing out libreoffice documents with random bullshit all over the place, but overall it's definitely better than OpenOffice ever was. Plus LibreOffice makes it stupidly easy to just export a PDF if all I need to give someone is read-access.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Not as bloated as MSOffice. There's nothing wrong with using either of them, but these people expected miracles from moving out of a proprietary system to an open system without putting any effort whatsoever into it. I don't have a problem with using libreoffice in my work environment because I forced everyone else to use it exclusively. Works great. Any old excel file/programs were simply converted to work right in libreoffice (Yes, surprise, you actually have to do some work to migrate to a different system!). And I don't have anyone send me any MSOffice files.
Meanwhile, have you tried opening an old document file in MSOffice with a recent copy of MSOffice? Absolute disaster just the same. I've seen some places have Office 97 and Office 360 together because the old docs don't look right in the new Office or some functionality removed. If you don't have the time, money or effort to properly migrate, then yeah, you're going to have problems no matter what. A lot of these businesses could have easily just hired some college kid part time to help them migrate, but they don't want too. A lot of these places don't even have any plans on how to properly migrate in the first place. Not even any plans to make sure updating MSOffice doesn't screw up everything.
Heck, I have issues with MS Word where documents I create that are fine on the shared printer near me are completely messed up when someone else opens it and their default printer is not the same...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This is unsurprising. As you may recall, in his "3rd Treatise on Government," John Locke wrote:
How he foresaw this, I cannot imagine. But you have to admit, he was right on target. Most people who are familiar with late 20th century technology would never even think of this, since in day-to-life you rarely care about pagination, or especially if your page breaks match someone else's -- indeed you probably only rarely think in terms of "pages" at all. Yet Locke had the distant objectivity, in order to see that pagination would some day return to being an important topic, worthy of peoples' -- nay, The People's -- attention.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
On the one hand, I have to agree: I use Libre at home and love my Excel VBA at work, and when it comes to interaction with databases, charting, the programming environment, I'd have to pick Excel for my job if they gave me the option, so I'd have to pick it for the corporation (8000 seats) too.
On the other: this wasn't the complaint. They were complaining about simple document tweaks like pagination. That makes it a bullshit complaint they just made up. My "corp" is a large city, but a city with 500 employees grand total isn't doing a lot of its engineering like we do, they're just cutting contracts to hire it out...and repaginating Word documents the contractors send them.
It's exactly with the "small office environments" that aren't slinging 30,000 rows of database into an excel spreadsheet with a touch of a button calling VBA that can do fine with Libre. It's the big places that are bound to be doing a number of complicated things that are out on the edge of what Office apps can do at all.
The same productivity loss as firing ten people.
Which, on the scale of the mentioned 300 people is barely above 3%.
You probably lose more than 3% of your time when you go peeing in the toilets or have a coffee break.
In most European jurisdictions, you can lose more than 3% productivity to sickness without even needing to justify it.
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By the same logic, you probably lose 1 sec a day burping and farting.
In a company of 100'000 (like some big branches of the State), that's nearly 30 man hours lost per day. That's nearly one week. The same productivity loss as firing five people.
Thus one needs to outlaw burping and farting for anyone working for the Government !!!!
I mean, dude, do you even math?
Dude, proportions, do you even ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
even the press release cannot mention a single good reason for it except "we have been conned in the past and now must pay the price... for pagination!"
I've been doing end user stuff for years, and Microsoft Office is a de facto standard. It's not because it's the absolute best product out there, but because compatibility needs to be maintained. Most -simple- documents and spreadsheets will open in one or the other. The problem comes when you get documents created with a Word template that someone got very creative with while building it. This happens a lot in engineering organizations, places that have document control/management systems, and yes, governments. Word has never had the easiest-to-decode formatting methods; that crown still goes to WordPerfect for the closed source world, and some law firms still use it today. Little stuff like page breaks, font kerning, and special positioning that don't matter in a simple document but matter a lot in a formal contract are sometimes very hard to find and fix in Word, for example.
The reality is that even though the format sucks, everyone is used to it and works around the quirks. Is it right? No, but it happens. No one outside of scientific publication is going to advocate for regular users to write their documents in TeX for example, even though that's the perfect example of a completely open, known formatting standard.
I think open source office suites are fine as long as you don't have crazy formatting needs and you don't have to share complex documents with too many Microsoft Office users. Otherwise, like the article says, users will waste time tweaking little things in their documents instead of doing productive work. If you're a small shop that has standardized on Linux, that's fine. One of the lifeblood things the company I work for does is respond to RFPs from governments. The standard response usually needs to be added to their crazily-formatted Word docs and Excel spreadsheets, and $deity help you if your use of LibreOffice is even thought of as the reason that a bid is rejected.
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.
I keep hearing people saying replacing MS office with openoffice or libreoffice is no brainer. It is no brainer when your're replacing the word processor. It is a total different story to replace excel.
Yup. Original source: news.microsoft.com
Even if Microsoft is the messenger that doesn't mean the message, that a town tried FOSS and found unexpected costs, is untrue. Liars will tell the truth when the truth is coincidentally on their side.
The town should have had an easy way to report their difficulties to the FOSS developers and the FOSS developers should have been responsive. Such reporting and response is necessary for FOSS adoption. I think this is the first thing to look into, not the messenger, not competition's sales force.
This is another case where the 80-20 rule comes into play. Almost everyone could switch to LibreOffice, but there are edge cases where Microsoft works better.
I uninstalled Microsoft Office and installed LibreOffice on my work laptop about a year or so ago. I'm a web programmer, so I use it only once every couple of weeks, to read and sometimes edit Word and Excel files from coworkers. So far so good. I even made a user guide with Write, including drawings made in Draw. I published it to PDF, so compatibility doesn't come up. Still, I liked using OpenOffice more than Microsoft Office, even ten years ago.
Someone got money for that, or a kickback..
That's just the way things like that work in municipal government.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
... to properly implement software that complies to open standards, is seen as a failure of open software to reproduce those bugs and non-standard features? Hm ... where have I seen this before?
The Italians didn't deploy it properly because I have never had any pagination issues when moving between .docx and .odt formats. Of course, I am using LibreOffice but the difference between Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice shouldn't be that extreme.
Maybe, but it pales in comparison to cloud hosted collaboration suites. Which coincidentally, Office365 and Google Docs are.
And Google Docs pales in comparison to the functionality of the desktop versions. I use Google Docs routinely but it's just not a viable solution for substantial parts of what I do, particularly for spreadsheet work. If you want to collaborate on a very simple document or spreadsheet then it is fine. Someday maybe it will match the desktop software in features but it isn't there yet.
That, or you can RTFA.
The problem was unrealistic expectations. They went from an all msoffice operation, to a hybrid one. msoffice is not compatible with anything else. You can migrate away from their formats, but you can't really interoperate with them without a lot of fiddling around. That's costly, and wasn't accounted for in the original planning. Shockingly, it costed time and money.
I did read the article and you are completely mistaken. The problem is OpenOffice's failure at being compatible. If it paginates wrong an OpenOffice developer should fix that. If macros are missing an OpenOffice developer should add those.
A hybrid approach is a given in the sense that outsiders will be sending or expecting office documents even if you are 100% OpenOffice internally. Compatibility is not an unrealistic expectation, it is a business requirement.
For instance, 0.25 hours * 300 employees * â10 per hour = â750 per day that they're spending on conversion. And that assumes the average wage is â10/hour; I would guess it's more.
And using the same counter example, that also means that - by my burping and farting example - burps and farts cost the government a whopping EUR 350 per days!!!
Let's outlaw burping and farting for employee in all branches of government, that will save the Greek economy!!!
In practice EUR 350 in a 100'000-big company is a drop of water in a bucket. Nobody with their right would buy your argument. Even thinking about your argument costs more money than the argument solves.
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Same with EUR 750 for a 300-small company, that's probably in the same ball-park that they're going to save if they switch to different different brands for various office supplies.
Keep in mind that the total budget for all the 300 salaries for the same 8-hour day would be EUR 24k. It completely dwarfs the EUR 750 you mention.
So unless Microsoft caves in and gives them a good rebate on the Microsoft Office license (which they could do, and apparently did in this case) it's not really worth considering.
And even including such a cheap license, the overall impact on the company will probably the small.
It's a ridiculously small price to pay.
Because overall, it's only about 15min per workday.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Opposed to peeing elsewhere? Yes, using the trashcan in my office *would* be more efficient, but one must draw the line somewhere.
My point exactly.
And for me, complaining that you lost 15min out of your whole workday goes into the same bucket (pun intended ;-P )
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Mussolini Word. Guaranteed to keep the trains running on time.
You see, this can't work in a large organization. It's fine in a small company to have a single computer with MS Office for emergencies. But once you have 100 or 1000 employees, having everybody go through a single chokepoint to get access to MS Office just isn't worth it. When employees are making $50,000 a year, it's not a big deal on the balance sheet when you are spending $100 a year on an MS Office license. You don't even need an license for everyone. Just one for the people who are likely to contact those outside the organization.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I wonder if they calculated how much time people spend trying to fix formatting errors in Word that just appear when working in it. I always found it so frustrating to work in Word because the formatting would screw up and there was no easy way to fix it. Maybe they've fixed it now but I doubt it. That's why I always liked WordPerfect because you could always do the reveal codes and see exactly where the problem was. The reveal codes in Word didn't help at all.
In a large organization, the number of people that actually need to care about which word processor they use is vanishingly small.
Few use it beyond the requirements of the most basic consumer user. Few need to be OCD about the end result.
Even in the corporate environment, modern Word Perfect wannabes are vast and ridiculous overkill for most people.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"You see, this can't work in a large organization. It's fine in a small company to have a single computer with MS Office for emergencies. But once you have 100 or 1000 employees, having everybody go through a single chokepoint to get access to MS Office just isn't worth it."
You know large organizations have more solutions to reach an Office copy than having an old desktop overthere for "just in case", right?
I.e.: a remote desktop service with 1 to 5% as many licenses as users.
"When employees are making $50,000 a year, it's not a big deal on the balance sheet when you are spending $100 a year on an MS Office license"
If there were no other expenses (time expenses) in using Microsoft than the yearly license you might be right. The point is that the productivity loses from using Office (and other Microsoft products for that matter) are considered "the standard" up to a point that they are invisible. This case is more or less the same, where the inability of Office to cooperate is taken for a flaw on the competition.
"last year the organization decided to switch back to Microsoft and use its cloud productivity suite Office 365"
What were the terms of the financial deal Microsoft made with the municipality?
What was the name of the company tasked with the Open Office migration?
Free software advocates heckle town of Pesaro
"You have to deal with files from other folks outside the organization."
No you dont. NOBODY sends excel spreadsheets and raw DOC files around. This has always been the biggest straw man argument, it just does not happen.
When I get a contract from Company XYZ, It's a PDF it is not a DOCX. When Vendor ZZT sends me the latest catalog and price list, its a PDF file not a spreadsheet.
It is this way in 95% of the business world. nobody sends raw editable document files around.
Except the millions of lawyers who do it every day...
... Overall, Netics researchers estimated a yearly cost per user of Eur530.38 over a five-year period
... By contrast, for Office 365, the cost was Eur197.49 a year.
... Using Skype for Business and Yammer
This implies that the Netics report has figures to an accuracy of better than 0.01%, which I find, to put it mildly, surprising.
I was going to post something along the lines that I am prepared to believe that an organisation might find it more efficient to use Microsoft products instead of open source, but that given the unbelievable precison of the figures:
(1) I don't trust the figures, and (2) I don't trust anyone who prepares a report with unbelievably precise figures: at best, they are being lazy in not rounding the raw figures, or worse they don't understand what they are doing, or at worst they are being deliberately misleading:
Spurious accuracy seduces journalists time and time again
Wikipedia - False Precision
Slashdotters may enjoy the 3.5inch floppy diskette story. Personal computers with 3.5 inch diskette drives were commonly specified as having 88.9 mm drives in metric countries, 88.9 mm being the exact, though overly precise, conversion of 3.5 inches. In fact, the diskettes are 90 mm wide everywhere in the world per ISO/IEC 9529-1 specification, 3.5 inch being an approximation. (I had intended to put an "allegedly" in front of that story, but the Wikipedia article links to that ISO/IEC specification and to an HP specifications sheet with the width of the diskette drive being 3.5in/88.9 mm!)
That was what I intended to post. Then it occurred to me to look at the Microsoft Italy page linked in the ZDNet article:
https://news.microsoft.com/it-...
Using Google Translate gives:
... with OpenOffice annual spending per user has been estimated at more than 500 euros, much higher than the previous annual spending Office user of about 118 Euros ...
... The annual expenditure per user with Office 365 is also approximately 197 euros ...
... the net annual spending per user falls further to around 110 euros ...
The "more than 500" is fine and the "around 110" is probably ok.
Being picky, the "about 118" and "approximately 197" should probably be rounded.
Even so, that is much better than the ludicrous "precision" of the figures in the ZDNet article. I assume Federico Guerrini (for Italy's got tech) didn't invent the figures in the ZDNet article, so a plausible guess is:
1. Maybe the Netics researchers' report did give figures to "better" than 0.01% "accuracy".
2. Someone in news.microsoft.com/it had the good sense to round these figures for their news item.
3. The ZDNet article by Federico Guerrini used the figures directly from the Netics report.
If so, then I suggest that the Italian ZDNet reporters take their Microsoft colleagues out for a long lunch and learn how to treat statistics properly, including asking *really* hard and probing questions to any researchers who use inappropriate precision.
If not, then I am really intrigued as to why the ZDNet article has those "precise" figures.
VBA was a marketing masterstroke on Microsoft's part.
Yes it was. Particularly in the financial services sector. Those folks have tied themselves to that mast about as tightly as is possible.
If you've been using LibreOffice for five years, and if a significant fraction of your staff are non-programmers, then you're probably pretty much locked into that by now. There are only two ways to avoid it: either you only employ programmers (and make sure they have all the tools they want), or you lock down your system so that people can't write and save macros. Either way has its own costs, and isn't viable for everyone.
Nope - not locked in at all. We simply don't have a huge need for macros for what we do. (manufacturing) Any we do write are pretty basic and would be easily replicated in a new system. Most VBA code is basically people trying to stuff 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound bag. We tend to use tools that are actually designed for the jobs we need them for. Basically we use spreadsheets as prototyping tools but if we have a very complicated spreadsheet we figure that probably is an indication we need a piece of software to do that task better - usually some sort of database.
My basic take on office suite macros is that they get used FAR more than is actually necessary or helpful. Sure sometimes they are the right solution but it's been a rare case where I couldn't find an adequate solution that didn't require them.
"lack of compatibility between the proprietary and the open source systems" There are two key points to be taken here: - governments big and small have to opt for open, free document formats that are not created by a megacompany like Microsoft. OOXML is the most convoluted and ridiculously complicated office file format ever invented, so bad that even the inventors (Microsoft) cannot make software that fully complies with that standard. - OOo (although who still uses that?) and LO need to have much better MSO file support. The issue here is that I could submit plenty of samples to the LO folks, but I fail to find any avenue to get an NDA from them because most of my samples are business docs that I would need to spend hours on to sanitize before submitting. At that point I have to throw the towel in.