14 DAY TRIAL // The city of Udine is the latest important city that plans to switch from Microsoft software to open source in an attempt that would in the end lead to savings of 360,000 euros ($466,000) in licensing costs.
The announcement was made by the municipality of Udine, which revealed that by the end of the year local computers should replace Microsoft Word with OpenOffice.
A total of 80 new computers will be purchased by December, authorities also announce, but contrary to what many would expect, open-source software will be the one powering their operations.
Old computers, on the other hand, will give up on Microsoft Office gradually, with OpenOffice to be installed on all of them during a process that’s expected to take at least a few years.
First Office, then Windows
The Udine municipality says that OpenOffice is a much better choice because many employees already use it at home, so there should be no drop in productivity.
Authorities will, however, offer additional training after deploying OpenOffice, just to make sure that everything works as it should and no confusion is created by the switch.
"Some of our PCs are stuck with pretty old software like Office 2000, which is no longer supported, as we haven't had the resources to upgrade," Gabriele Giacomini, the innovation and economic development councilor for the municipality of Udine, told ZDNet.
"By switching to open source we will have the chance to allow our employees to work with the latest version of the suite."
Employee training, which the municipality believes would be very affordable, should help everyone make the most of the new Office suite, without being affected by the change.
"We think we can do the training with internal resources, therefore not adding further costs to the organization," Giacomini added.
Next year, the municipality hopes to replace Windows with Linux, as many of the computers in the city are still powered by Windows XP. At this point, however, such a transition is very difficult due to the big number of proprietary apps which cannot run on Linux, they say, but alternative solutions should be found until the process is started.
"This is something we tried to do in the past but we had too many proprietary applications that could not run on Linux and we had to scrap the idea," Antonio Scaramuzzi, the city of Udine's CIO, said. "Now it definitely looks more feasible and it could lead us further on the way to the open software."