14 DAY TRIAL // The Document Foundation was pleased to announce today that the Municipality of Tirana, the capital of Albania, has moved to Open Source software and the open standards by migrating to LibreOffice.
Being the capital city, Tirana is the most populous city in Albania, known for its colorful, post-Communist buildings and Soviet-era architecture. In an attempt to adopt the Open Source way to save more money, Tirana has recently attempted to implement various free and open source solutions for their public IT infrastructure, by migrating to projects like Nextcloud and LibreOffice.
"Ermir Puka, the head of the ICT Department, believes that despite the resistance to change and the other big challenges facing the migration, using free and open source software and platforms like LibreOffice – supporting open standards – will guide the IT infrastructure of the municipality in the best interest of the citizens of Tirana," writes The Document Foundation's Italo Vignoli.
More than 1,000 PCs have been migrated to LibreOffice
The move to Free and Open Source standards will help Tirana's ICT Department avoid proprietary lock-in, especially thanks to the Open Document Format (ODF) ISO standard used by the LibreOffice office suite to exchange and store documents managed by OASIS, which promotes the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards in the public and private sector.
Tirana's migration to the LibreOffice office suite has started with the HR Department, where employees use documents and spreadsheets more often than other departments. LibreOffice Writer and Calc are used to edit and create these documents in more than 1,000 workstations in the Municipality of Tirana. To ease the migration, Albanian translated manuals of LibreOffice Writer and Calc were provided, and the IT staff is now working on an online learning course for all employees.
LibreOffice is currently the most used open-source office suite across all major computer operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and Mac. LibreOffice provides a viable alternative to proprietary office suites like Microsoft Office, and The Document Foundation is currently working on the next major release, LibreOffice 6.2, which should be available in February 2019 with lots of new features and enhancements.