There was an interesting little piece in the Guardian few days ago suggesting that local authorities could save £51 million by moving some council employees to Open Office* and ODF**, and away from Microsoft Office and their document format, with the total savings rocketing to £200 million if every council employee in the country moved over.
This sensible proposal came from Cllr Liam Maxwell who’s reponsible for IT in the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and I’m sure Cllr Maxwell would be the first to acknowledge it’s not a new suggestion. The office suite – as a commodity piece of software – has long been seen as one of the easiest ways to get open source onto people’s desktops and save money in the process.
I’m certain Cllr Maxwell also appreciates that there are issues, some of which are mentioned in the Guardian, but they’re not made very clear and it’s worth expanding on them.
ODF is a document standard, but not one that’s yet widely used by the general public. Send most people a document in ODF format and they’ll struggle to open it. That’s not to say switching to ODF is a bad idea – it isn’t. But there’s a lot of work involved in switching over so you want a good reason to do it.
Right now I’m not sure what that reason might be. Open Office can read and write files in the Microsoft formats and, whilst it would be fantastic for the public sector to promote open standards, we should have a clear case that switching to ODF will save money and I don’t see that yet. The cost of converting existing documents to ODF shouldn’t be under-estimated. For 95% of documents it’s easy, but the other 5% won’t quite look or work right and will take an age to sort out.
The issue of moving from Microsoft Office to Oracle’s Open Office (or the fully open source variant openoffice.org, or indeed some other office suite) is a separate issue.
Open Office is a piece of (mostly) open source software. That has a number of implications but in reality the important one for local authorities is that it’s free (or cheap, if you want to buy in support). It’s perfectly good software too. I’ve been using it for the best part of a decade as my office suite of choice and it’s nearly always met my needs. It isn’t as good as Microsoft Office – in my experience it’s a little less polished, a little more buggy and the presentation and database packages in particular (the equivalents of PowerPoint and Access) are clearly inferior. But for most purposes it’s more than good enough for the job.
So by switching to Open Office you can save millions on software licensing. This is a good thing. But there are other costs and risks to consider.
Cllr Maxwell rightly raises the issue of converting systems across. Like most large organisations, councils have all sorts of applications, templates, plug-ins and similar written specifically to work with Microsoft Office. Most of those can be converted to work with Open Office. Not all though. If your local authority has invested in Microsoft Sharepoint, it simply isn’t going to work as well if you switch from MS Office to Open Office. You can try asking Microsoft to fix that, but don’t hold your breath.
The suggestion is that the big consultancies like Capita could re-write most of the applications for Open Office, but currently choose not to because the money isn’t there to make it worthwhile. By mandating open source from government (i.e. Whitehall telling local authorities what sort of software they’ve got to use, whether they like it or not), that incentive would be created.
True up to a point. Where there are common applications used by lots of councils that currently interact with Microsoft Office, it will indeed work out much cheaper if they all change. But few local authorities are in that situation. They’ve mostly been doing their own things for decades and the cost of re-writing the applications just used by one or two councils, and critical to the business workflow, could be huge.
Then there’s training and user buy-in. Many a well-meaning open source implementation has fallen flat because the users didn’t like it, so your local authority needs to include lots of time and money for consulting with users before any switch, involving them during the move and properly training them up.
And there are also concerns about the future of Open Office. In 2008 OpenOffice.org had just 24 people writing significant amounts of code for it. Now it’s owned by Oracle, its future is even more uncertain. OK, it’s open source so in theory anyone could take it up. But looking at the history of the project, that’s by no means a certainty.
I would love to be able to agree that switching to open source and ODF, with cheaper desktops, would save local authorities millions of pounds. I am a long-term happy user of Linux and Open Source on the desktop for both business and home.
There are definitely situations where moving to open source alternatives can save lots of money – especially back-end server software (e.g. with MySQL database, Apache webserver).
But any big move, especially on the desktop, would take a huge amount of councillor and officer time and would almost certainly not offer as big a saving as predicted.
Even if the whole £200 million saving Cllr Maxwell hopes for could be realised, that still only works out at an average saving of £500,000 per local authority. That’s not to be sniffed at, but we need to remember that council staff spending time working on a switch to open source and ODF then can’t be spending that time looking for other savings.
If we want to save half a million quid in the IT department, it may be a lot easier and less painful to do it by moving to cloud computing, virtual servers, thin clients or simply the old tried and tested method of looking at IT spend and figuring out where it’s not delivering much real benefit or where the authority’s being stiffed by suppliers.
Advocates of Free and Open Source Software will argue that many of these barriers are artificial ones, created by the proprietary software vendors like Microsoft to stifle competition. That’s certainly true, but doesn’t mean local authorities should spend taxpayers’ money fighting that battle.
In these times of cuts, local authorities need to be looking to save money on their IT. Much as I wish it were otherwise, I don’t believe the case has been made for a big switch to open source and ODF as the solution to that particular problem, and the public sector should proceed down that road with caution.
* Open Office is a mostly open source office suite owned by Oracle (the database company), built on the open source OpenOffice.org and similar to Microsoft Office.
** ODF or Open Document Format, is one way of storing the information from a word processing document, spreadsheet or other office file. In word processing terms, ODF is an alternative to file types like .doc and .docx from Microsoft, so instead of opening myfile.doc or myfile.docx you open myfile.odt. ODF is an open standard, meaning that anyone with suitable amounts of time, money and expertise can read the specification and programme their software to read and write ODF files.
10 Comments
Moving from MS office to Open office is an immensely difficult thing for local authorities to do, because a) the number of government returns that are MANDATED in MS formats (usually with macros and other nasties in), and b) the number of partners they have to share documents with. Bristol City Council has tried this (with Star office, a Sun product based on Openoffice), and has had a difficult time. The reality is that many PCs are required to have ad-hoc MS office licences to deal with both of these problems.
Cllr Maxwell apparently claims that only 5% of PCs should need to have access to MS office for comparability, but this is not the experience of others. If staff arent to share communal MS office machines to do their work, a more realistic % is 40-50%.
There are actually much easier wins to be had on moving to open source for IT infrastructure (printing, networking, sharing, email, calendaring, etc). That is where councils should put their effort right now, as well as enforcing open document formats wherever possible, and in all major contracts. There is nothing to stop any organisation putting openoffice onto all of their machines, as it’s free – to coexist with other software until more people get used to using ODF. This has to be a serious goal – breaking the MS stranglehold will increase freedom, which all Liberals should aim for.
You’re right that any move to open-source software wouldn’t save money immediately because of the support/conversion issues involved, but I disagree that it isn’t worth switching just because of that. In the long term it will definitely save money, and any conversion process could be spread out, as the councils will still having working licenses for MS Office for quite a while.
I completely agree with all the points raised. I don’t disagree with the idea of moving over to OOo in principle, but now is clearly a bad time to do it, at least until the dust settles with regards the Oracle/Sun buyout. There should, however, be a long-term goal of moving from proprietary vendor-specific formats to open formats.
Open source should be used, but only where appropriate. It’s a matter of choosing the right product for the right job, and open source software isn’t always the right answer. There are many cases where, for example, choosing MySQL/PostgreSQL over MS-SQL/Oracle would be disasterous decision (especially since MySQL is also now Oracle-owned with big question-marks over its future).
I agree with Nick- money is being wasted on the MS Office suite. It’s a great suite of software, but we shouldn’t be paying for it. As you say, Open Office can read .doc formats and so on, so interoperability isnt a major issue for a standard user. I’m not saying get right of MS Office entirely, but it wouldn’t take a vast investment to discover where machines *didnt* need full MS functionality and those could be migrated.
Where I work (NHS), a team of 10 or more clinicians use the full MS Office suite to use the most basic functionality of Excel and Outlook. They do not need a full license and that money could be better allocated.
I think you’re making the mistake of viewing it as an all or nothing option. The truth is it can be done in stages and savings can be made quickly in the easily migrated areas.2
“I’m certain Cllr Maxwell also appreciates that there are issues, some of which are mentioned in the Guardian, but they’re not made very clear and it’s worth expanding on them.”
It isn’t the software package that matters, it is the document format, and if you want a good reason why then have a look at the costs involved in retrieving digital data from old Microsoft Office formats that have been obsoleted, and and are now difficult to retrieve because MS no longer sells that version of their office software, and does not use open standards/formats that would allow other office packages to pick up the burden.
Up until now ODF had limited accessibility support, as of v1.2 this is no longer an issue, we SHOULD be using this in government.
That’s the biggest problem of course.
But then, if councils can save millions per year, use some of that money to pool a team of staff, fork the code, and release a UK version, funded by the money saved from dumping MS.
It would need startup time though, as the savings would filter through but you’d need the team at work before councils start adopting it. Interesting challenge, save a fortune mid tem by spending money now. How many f/t devs would you need?
Or even, how many part timers working the rest of their week in IT at various councils around the country?
“In 2008 OpenOffice.org had just 24 people writing significant amounts of code”
That really isn’t uncommon.
The real problem is with compatibility (as mentioned) but even more with ‘support’.
The problem with open source software is that it is harder to get support and it is often quite expensive (while muche support for Office is free). Ultimately it is more important to both companies and the government to have reliable and compatible software rather than make fairly skimpy savings by installing open source and making sure everyone gets used to it (if businesses found it more economically viable, they would have done ti arleady).
That’s not to say there isn’t an argument for doing it where appropriate, for example in schools (it could save a bigger proportion of money in schools for a better effect).
Of course you also have the fact that there is not (to my knowledge) a better open source equivalent of either Micrsoft Powerpoint or Excel. Excel remains the best accessible spreadsheet program (and is used a lot).
Of course the most successful cross-platform format is HTML and I’ve never understood why more businesses haven’t moved over to Wiki-based document authoring systems. It encourages sensibly structured documents and is easy to create and collaborate on and PDF export isn’t difficult.
With Powerpoint and Excel, it’s true that the OOo suite programs aren’t quite as feature-rich, but they’re probably adequate. For proper statistics then (open source) R is much better than Excel and if you’re just typing in figures and summing columns and things then OpenCalc or whatever it’s called, or the Google spreadsheet app is quite enough.
As for Powerpoint, I think the majority of presentations would be improved by simply removing the awful bullet point slideshows people put together and then read verbatim. If you need pictures then any photo browser can do the job.
Groan.
It’s not free. That guy who comes around to fix your Office setup every time it breaks? He is getting paid for this
When I read about Open Source there is normally an emphasis on cost or lack of it. This is misleading. The potential of Open Source Software (OSS) has to be taken in context and in a strategic way. It’s always possible to raise criticisms and concerns about new ways of doing things. Putting the potential to move in a bigger picture, ie in context, is essential.
The OSS paradigm can offer high quality solutions to a wealth of IT / software challenges. Open Office is just one aspect of OSS. There are many platforms involving server, client, networking and management solutions. At OpusV.com we have practising OSS for many years. It’s easy to raise objections to OSS but if the issues you currenlty face in IT are material enough, the move can be rewarding. Like anything, it needs to be planned carefully. On a cost note the OSS way should ensure that you are paying for professional services including support. The absence of licence fees is significant in the corporate sphere and covers not only the client and server products but the iniquitous Client Access Licences, one of every desk for every proprietary server product for many.
So, I would suggest the proper way to consider OSS is to review your entire IT information systems and infrastructure. The use of Open Office clearly needs to address interoperation for quite a while both within the organisation and with third party ones. Meanwhile, consider OSS for Enterprise Systems that may be browser based. These systems can harness the considerable power of Perl and Catalyst, on a fine foundation of Linux. This can offer a good use of OSS without the interoperation issues and can point you in the right direction for the future.