Open Office Implementation in Galway City Council, by Mary Clarke

1. OPEN OFFICE IMPLEMENTATION 12th.Apri,l2011 Mary Clarke, Galway City Council A Series of Milestones which commenced with the decision to seriously investigate the feasibility of a migration from Microsoft Office to Open Office in terms of Value for Money whilst retaining a reliable, user friendly efficient solution.

3. Reliability – 20+ years development, developed principally by Sun with contributions from individual users, groups and large companies e.g.IBM

4. Licenced - Yes under LGPL and SISSL Open Source Protocol

5. Security – Secure as proprietary software

7. Netherlands – guidelines to includeOpen Source in Procurement

8. France – Trend to Open Source, Political Pact to use it

10. Circular 2009/004 – Include Open Source as viable alternative for software requirements in all procurement

11. Circular 2009/004 came into effect on 1 st April 2011

13. Simple tests within their areas of expertise

14. Accuracy and reliability across Windows 2000, XP and 2003 Platforms and in conjunction with Microsoft Office 2000, 2003 and 2007

21. Routeman – Refuse System uses MS Office

25. Remove Ms Access from client Pcs

26. Install Runtime Access

27. Scheduled implementation dept by dept over a number of weeks.

29. Managed Front-Line Services

30. Business reporting tools output saved as html files

31. Compatible with Open Office

33. Senior Management Grades & High-end users such as the Finance Dept special teams to retain MS Office Professional

34. Ms Exchange/Outlook Environment - Purchase Outlook 2007 for Open Office Clients

35. Cost Benefit Analysis based on Ms Buyout prices – significant savings .

36. Would be 'Legal' and still afford to purchase additional items in buyout.

39. Department by Department

40. Commence with smaller non-frontline departments

41. Students to remain in support role in department for 2 weeks

42. Technical & Development Teams to support the students

43. Telephone & one to one support thereafter,

45. Created a Batch file run at Installation stage to associate MS Office products with Open Office.

47. Showed Initiative – asked the questions

48. Minority required assistance with basic operations e.g. Printing. Formatting

50. or

54. Provided small group training in basic word processing and work related documents.

56. Find & Replace – both run on a slightly different version of VB using regular expressions as well as wild cards. It is a more powerful solution but cumbersome to use.

57. We have highlighted these problems with Open Source

59. Single software suite with multiple functions operating in consistent manner vs MS multiple interconnected programs.

60. Interface similar to Ms Office – less of a transition than to MS Office 2007

61. Compatible with diverse file formats html, pdf,csv & all versions of MS Word.

62. Future proofed our office environment for next number of years.

63. Support available from SME's.