The administration of the Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region ended in 2015 a process to switching to the open source office suite, OpenOffice. Replacing the proprietary software suite, Microsoft Office. It agreed this decision based on research that involved Italian and European administrations.
Motivation for switch process
In 2013, the administration decided to switch to OpenOffice to reduce the licencing cost that it would have spent for updating the outdated MS Office. As they used 2003 version of the proprietary office suite and they need to renew 3200 software license.
The employees of the Italian administration saw that that the new open source office suite will offer basically the same functionality and the switch process will save money without sacrificing technological capabilities.
Also, the region has already some experience with the use of OpenOffice. In 2008 and 2009 it carried out a first test, involving between 100 and 300 users. But some technical issues prevent it from spreading the using of the open source office suite until it take a final decision to switch in October 2013.
Implementation
The administration of the Italian region, which employs some 3545 office staff, set aside a budget of €220,000 for the switching process to OpenOffice; this budget included a staff training element. And it started the switching process in 2013 with three-month pilot phase involving 300 workstations.
In 2015, the migration to OpenOffice completed as the new software used on 4200 workstations, across 10 departments and 5 agencies. In addition, Open Document Format (ODF) be the default document format.
Results
The region has saved about 2 million euro on licences for a proprietary alternative, and it admitted that the new open source office suite met their objectives of efficiency and effectiveness, delivering services to citizens.