Switching to StarOffice Reflections on Bristol City Council's - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
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
Reflections on Bristol City Council's experiences since 2005
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.
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
MS Office StarOffice 100000 200000 300000 400000 500000 600000 700000 800000 900000 1000000 1100000 1200000 1300000 1400000 1500000
Implementing StarOffice cost us £484k – double
Project Management £60,000 Communications £27,000 Training £149,000 Deployment £87,000 Document Conversion £58,000 Floorwalking £54,000 Budget/Plan vs. Actuals: ➔ Deployment only cost £10,000 ➔ Floorwalking took an additional 6 months ➔ Mop-up tasks took 3 months post- project 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
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,
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