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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.
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 ]
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.
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.
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.