2 new moves to OpenDocument Format
Another two organisations chose to migrate to the possible document format of the future.
The City of Bristol Converting to StarOffice
The City of Bristol, UK, a member of the Open Source Academy, is to migrate its about 5,500 desktops from Microsoft Office to Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice 8.0, which features ODF support. After a public TCO analysis (which is meant to help others deciding), the City counts on a 60% savings over a five year period. They use Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Microsoft Office, some of with with multiple versions that make the document exchange rather tough now.
However, there are some questions - for example: on why did they rather choose the non-free StarOffice over OpenOffice? Interestingly fact is also it seems the reason of the switch is rather pure economical calculation with close to no stress on document accessibility. So this story is interesting to be a pure business fight of Sun and Microsoft, who has pitched hard, but not successfully. Gavin Beckett, Bristol City Council’s IT strategy manager, says that “each MS Office licence was 12 times more expensive than the equivalent StarOffice licence for the public sector.”
National Archives of Australia Adopt ODF
National Archives of Australia (NAA) move to the OpenDocument Format for its digital archives on a long term archival storage. A pretty big document conversion will probably be needed as NAA uses many different formats by now. In its activity, the Archives is known to almost only receive documents created elsewhere, so if it succeeds, it will be a very good proof of OpenDocument’s intercompatibility.
The NAA gathers its fruits form introducing the ODF - as it was a contributing member of the OASIS Technical Committee that created the standard and has been submitting the document code changes to the CVS repository on Sourceforge regularly during the OASIS standardization process. NAA has chosen OpenOffice 2.0 to internally deal with ODF but wants to use whatever available ODF-compliant software in the future