Switching to StarOffice Reflections on Bristol City Council's experiences since 2005 Dr. Gavin Beckett ICT Strategy Manager
In 2008, Bristol City Council is still the only large public sector body using ODF in the UK.
Stepping away from Microsoft formats confronts senior decision makers with a range of challenges.
Our biggest challenge is that most of our business system suppliers, and service delivery partners use MS formats and applications. Policy & Service Delivery Partners Customer Channels Line of Business Applications Infrastructure and Services
We need to convince our suppliers and partners to invest in support for ODF.
Government users need to act in concert, at both policy and practical levels, using their collective weight to level the playing field.
Bristol switched to StarOffice to reduce costs, introduce open standards, and enable investment in staff skills. = = £0.00
Implementing StarOffice for 5,500 desktops in Bristol cost £1.1m less than the total cost of implementing MS Office. MS Office TCO = £1,706,684 StarOffice TCO = £670,010 www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk
The licences for StarOffice cost us £186k, in comparison to £1.4m for MS Office 1500000 1400000 1300000 1200000 1100000 1000000 900000 800000 700000 600000 500000 400000 300000 200000 100000 0 MS Office StarOffice £1.46m £186k
Implementing StarOffice cost us £484k – double our estimate for MS Office Communications Training Project Deployment £27,000 £149,000 Management £87,000 £60,000 Budget/Plan vs. Actuals: ➔ Deployment only cost £10,000 ➔ Floorwalking took an additional 6 months Document Floorwalking ➔ Mop-up tasks took 3 months post- Conversion £54,000 project £58,000 We completed the project with a small underspend on the budget.
ODF may be the international standard for office applications, but that doesn’t make it widely used or supported in the UK.
The idea of an openly accessible standard file format is very attractive. EDRM Enterprise Service Bus
The reality is that due to decades of MS dominance, the file format is secondary to application integration in UK public sector.
UK public sector ISVs mainly use macros, VB, batch processing and SQL, rather than direct creation and transformation of XML files
Persuading suppliers and partners to change their ways has been an uphill struggle in the last 3 years.
Some ISVs have simply refused to work with us, or support ODF applications.
Other vendors have been willing to work with us, if we directly funded the development, with Sun providing resources.
A wide variety of statutory bodies supply us with systems based on MS Office or require data interchanges in MS formats.
UK Government policy is still very laissez-faire
Continental Europe is setting a more active, energetic pace
The Netherlands’ “Open Connection” action plan should enable you to avoid many of the challenges Bristol faces
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