A bit off-topic, but I really don't think that LibreOffice is a good alternative for MS Office. Every single time I try to do something in LibreOffice I find out that it's missing some incredibly basic feature that I need. Last time it was rotating images in Writer: I had to edit the image in another app.
MS products get a lot of hate but I think that Office (at least the newest verions) really has nailed it. Shame it's not on Linux.
I really don't understand the lack of rotate. They have solarize, charcoal and other effects but not something that basic. The issue is over a decade old https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3545
Agreed. I tried using the Libre suite for a while to save on costs, but the time I spent grappling with Libre was worth much more to me than the $120 cost of Office.
You can rightfully accuse Office of feature creep, but I'd still rather use it over any of its competitors.
That might also be where they came up with the 21 million euro number. Having every single office employee take days of training to learn how to sidestep all the quirks in LibreOffice is expensive.
As a contrast, I've pretty much lived in LibreOffice (and a little Google Docs) for the past ~2 years for personal stuff and haven't found much I miss from MS Office. My needs for an office suite are pretty basic though, I suppose.
Everybody in the Finnish software business knows that much of the public procurement happens over various "old boys club" arrangements, and "surprisingly" usually ends in the hands of the same two or three big IT providers.
Finland used to be regarded as one of the least corrupted countries, but that has crumbled as more and more of these situations surface.
Please don't spread those kind of rumors as they are not true. Public procurement happens through an open process in which I have been also participating. Everybody involved can get their competitors RFQ replies and get the verdict with comments for each RFQ section.
True, most big acquirements go for two or three big IT providers, but let's face it - how many big IT companies Finland can hold which have the men power available to provide big systems and long term support? And for the record, I do not work for any of those three.
The official reply for requesting the details of the Open Office report was denied due to the fact that city of Helsinki has made a deal with Gartner Ireland Ltd which denies them giving out the figures for two years. Perhaps a bad contract, but hopefully they'll learn from it.
The migration from MS Office to LibreOffice is not straightforward, especially if you have millions of documents. In my experience, any complex document will almost always fail to render correctly ...
I don't think public sector and enterprises should try to find alternative software for Microsoft Office. Instead, they should move everything to browser and kill software by implementing great document/content management systems support that.
They say that their 21000 pc pilot project with LibreOffice shows that using LibreOffice over their proprietary office tools increases the cost by 70%. This seems very difficult to believe without proper arguments.
It's not hard to see how the numbers could start adding up. If it costs 21M Euros for a 21K PC pilot project, that's 1000 Euros per PC which sounds a bit low. Consider:
* How many users do they have, what's their sophistication level, and what kind of retraining will be required to use a new software product?
* How will incompatibilities be handled with their existing documents? Is LibreOffice absolutely 100% feature complete identical to Microsoft Office? If not, what proportion of documents use incompatible features? How much effort is required to determine this incompatibility? How much effort is required to redo these documents to fix the incompatibility? How many employees are required to be on such a conversion team and how long will the conversion take? Can the conversion even be done?
* How is interaction done with external users who send Office documents? What happens when users outside their office send them Office documents which make use of incompatible features? Will this require maintaining an ongoing conversion team? What is the opportunity cost inherent in the delays in getting documents converted?
* How is installation of LibreOffice done? Can it be setup on a centralized WSUS server and automatically deployed to every user as Microsoft Office can, or does it require an army of people manually installing it on thousands of PCs? How are updates for both version upgrades and security patches handled? What is the typical update schedule for LibreOffice (security-related patches, compatibility upgrades, etc.) and will this need to be done manually as well? How many man-hours per year will this take?
* LibreOffice doesn't include an email product. What alternate solution would they use? What is the cost to convert all Outlook email and archives to this new solution? Can the new solution make use of all calendaring and other Exchange-related features that Outlook has? Can the new solution be deployed on WSUS and kept up to date automatically, or does this too require an army of people manually installing and doing updates? Can they maintain the security permissions they currently use, such as restricting the ability for users to forward internal communications outside the office?
* LibreOffice doesn't have a Visio, Project, or OneNote replacements. What are they going to use for these? How do they convert existing documents and interact with external users who send them Office documents? Is it even possible?
And so on and so forth. Free is seldom free, and LibreOffice isn't a replacement for the full suite of Office functionality. People like to bash Microsoft because it's what all the cool kids are doing, but once you factor in the amount of time involved in all the above Microsoft Office is the cheapest solution around.
One way I can think of that is not surprising would be they dumped LibreOffice on users with no training. That generated a huge uptick in support calls and therefore costs.
A lot of migration projects seem set up to fail, the quickest way to do that is make the users unhappy and site increased support costs.
I can see Outlook and exchange alone representing major hurdles and expenses that could cause this.
If you already own office then the cost of getting new calandering and email software up and running for a large group and then training them on how to use it is non trivial.
It's not difficult to see how LibreOffice costs more than Microsoft office.
Lets imagine that the average city worker gets paid $60,000 per year and works 1500 hours per year, (35 hour work week, 4 weeks paid vacation) or $40 per hour.
A copy of Office on newegg costs $349 which is pretty much the highest price anyone will ever pay for MS Office. A city probably pays closer to $50 to $100.
Lets imagine a day of training for LibreOffice, and a day of downtime over a year due to incompatibilities (lets assume that there are no bugs in Libre Office and the incompatibilities are purely due to MS's monopolistic practices), 14 hours times $40 is $560 and we haven't even paid for the instructor for the training or the IT guy to fix the problems.
Perhaps if you assume that the person is already proficient in Microsoft Office, that might be true. But if you've ever watched someone go through the MS Office 2003 ==> 2007/2010 transition ("You do not like the ribbon? You must bear the ribbon!") it is not a productive sight either. They're still using Office 2003 on Windows XP at my wife's job.
[+] [-] veeti|13 years ago|reply
MS products get a lot of hate but I think that Office (at least the newest verions) really has nailed it. Shame it's not on Linux.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmduke|13 years ago|reply
You can rightfully accuse Office of feature creep, but I'd still rather use it over any of its competitors.
[+] [-] kevinchen|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bergie|13 years ago|reply
Finland used to be regarded as one of the least corrupted countries, but that has crumbled as more and more of these situations surface.
No wonder they want to keep their costs secret.
[+] [-] tommi|13 years ago|reply
True, most big acquirements go for two or three big IT providers, but let's face it - how many big IT companies Finland can hold which have the men power available to provide big systems and long term support? And for the record, I do not work for any of those three.
The official reply for requesting the details of the Open Office report was denied due to the fact that city of Helsinki has made a deal with Gartner Ireland Ltd which denies them giving out the figures for two years. Perhaps a bad contract, but hopefully they'll learn from it.
[+] [-] Jacobi|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpkeisala|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Juha|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biot|13 years ago|reply
* How many users do they have, what's their sophistication level, and what kind of retraining will be required to use a new software product?
* How will incompatibilities be handled with their existing documents? Is LibreOffice absolutely 100% feature complete identical to Microsoft Office? If not, what proportion of documents use incompatible features? How much effort is required to determine this incompatibility? How much effort is required to redo these documents to fix the incompatibility? How many employees are required to be on such a conversion team and how long will the conversion take? Can the conversion even be done?
* How is interaction done with external users who send Office documents? What happens when users outside their office send them Office documents which make use of incompatible features? Will this require maintaining an ongoing conversion team? What is the opportunity cost inherent in the delays in getting documents converted?
* How is installation of LibreOffice done? Can it be setup on a centralized WSUS server and automatically deployed to every user as Microsoft Office can, or does it require an army of people manually installing it on thousands of PCs? How are updates for both version upgrades and security patches handled? What is the typical update schedule for LibreOffice (security-related patches, compatibility upgrades, etc.) and will this need to be done manually as well? How many man-hours per year will this take?
* LibreOffice doesn't include an email product. What alternate solution would they use? What is the cost to convert all Outlook email and archives to this new solution? Can the new solution make use of all calendaring and other Exchange-related features that Outlook has? Can the new solution be deployed on WSUS and kept up to date automatically, or does this too require an army of people manually installing and doing updates? Can they maintain the security permissions they currently use, such as restricting the ability for users to forward internal communications outside the office?
* LibreOffice doesn't have a Visio, Project, or OneNote replacements. What are they going to use for these? How do they convert existing documents and interact with external users who send them Office documents? Is it even possible?
And so on and so forth. Free is seldom free, and LibreOffice isn't a replacement for the full suite of Office functionality. People like to bash Microsoft because it's what all the cool kids are doing, but once you factor in the amount of time involved in all the above Microsoft Office is the cheapest solution around.
[+] [-] mhurron|13 years ago|reply
A lot of migration projects seem set up to fail, the quickest way to do that is make the users unhappy and site increased support costs.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chollida1|13 years ago|reply
If you already own office then the cost of getting new calandering and email software up and running for a large group and then training them on how to use it is non trivial.
[+] [-] fleitz|13 years ago|reply
Lets imagine that the average city worker gets paid $60,000 per year and works 1500 hours per year, (35 hour work week, 4 weeks paid vacation) or $40 per hour.
A copy of Office on newegg costs $349 which is pretty much the highest price anyone will ever pay for MS Office. A city probably pays closer to $50 to $100.
Lets imagine a day of training for LibreOffice, and a day of downtime over a year due to incompatibilities (lets assume that there are no bugs in Libre Office and the incompatibilities are purely due to MS's monopolistic practices), 14 hours times $40 is $560 and we haven't even paid for the instructor for the training or the IT guy to fix the problems.
[+] [-] dmethvin|13 years ago|reply