Bristol City Council Converts 5,500 desktops to StarOffice
quote from egovmonitor.com
Bristol City Council is set to save 60 per cent on software costs over five years following its decision to switch from Microsoft Office to Sun’s StarOffice.
The decision was taken following a full evaluation of the costs and benefits of both platforms that included staff retraining, migration and support costs of switching the 5,500 users from a mixture of predominantly Microsoft systems to StarOffice.
The council had identified a need to simplify the mixed environment of Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Microsoft Office. Too much time was spent on converting documents, even for internal sharing, and without a corporate licensing agreement there were many versions of each product in use. Many of these tools did not support the newer features of Microsoft Office, and this made collaborating with partners more difficult.
The obvious solution was to standardise on Microsoft Office, but the decision by Microsoft to make changes to its volume licensing terms, removing upgrade rights and introducing Software Assurance, significantly increased costs for Bristol Council and provided an opportunity, and another incentive, to explore the other options available.
Ultimately the decision was made to move over to Sun’s StarOffice office suite. Not only was this a key win for the supporters of ‘open source’ software (OSS), it also closed the door to the dreaded vendor lock-in that plagues some of its ‘closed source’ counterparts. Such proprietary software is upgraded and updated regularly, requiring other vendors to have to continually play catch up to ensure continued interoperability. This places pressure on users to remain with the proprietary software and pay for upgrades frequently. OSS uses an Open Standard format which makes the development of compatible products simple and interoperability is guaranteed by design, thus reducing costs in the long term.