The Italian Military chose to use LibreOffice office suite and started the migration process by sign a deal with the LibreItalia Association, which is a non-profit organization that promotes LibreOffice.
The non-profit organization helped the Italian Military with trainers for their offices across the country, in a project they called LibreDifesa.
Under this LibreDifesa project, over 100,000 desktops of defense ministry will be migrated to LibreOffice from Microsoft Office by the deadline of the project after about four years. Around 75,000 workstations will be migrated by the end of the year 2017. Remaining 25,000 workstations will be migrated by 2020.
Also, under the migration to OSS project the Italian Military started to develop educational content for a series of online training courses on LibreOffice, which will be made available under a copyleft license.
General Camillo Sileo, Deputy Chief of Department VI in the Italian Military, assured that the entire migration is estimated to save somewhere between 26-29 million Euro. He said: “we have migrated 5,000 workstations and have not yet encountered any serious problems”. And added: “This will be the biggest LibreOffice deployment in Europe”.
Sileo Also gives several reasons for the migration to LibreOffice:
• In Italy's Digital Administration Code, open source software is preferred over proprietary software if it is equally suitable;
• Adopting the open document format ODF, guarantees interoperability and accessibility after a long period of time, and makes the government independent of software suppliers; and would increase efficiency and lower cost;
• Using LibreOffice across the whole defense organization provides everyone with a uniform software version, which will increase productivity in the medium and long term;
• Large financial savings can be gained as the Microsoft support expires over the next five years; these saving are estimated at 26-29 million Euro over the whole defense organization.
