An Example set by French Govt: Use Open-source Productivity Suits for Public Deptartments
How long are Governments around the world going to keep telling their people that open-source tools cannot be used for large public organizations/Govt. departments? Today, let us look at an excellent example set by the French Govt. as they transition 500,000 desktops to the free open-source office productivity suite – LibreOffice.
And, do you know what they are migrating from? Open Office!
Yes, the French Govt. has long been using free & open-source based office productivity suits for their large, critical public departments. In fact, with the help of private contractors (who provide support), the French Govt. is using more than 350 free & open-source applications across 15 ministries.
What do you think about that?
Coming back to the large-scale usage of open-source office productivity suites in the French Govt. departments, the credit should majorly go to MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite – Well, a rough translation of the French name).
MIMO is a special Govt. dept. which was formed with the goal of mutual coordination; resourcing the knowledge gained by individual members/departments to the benefit of all; and of course, to facilitate massive IT cost reduction by enabling individual departments to use open-source software.
MIMO validates and certifies every version of Libre Office using a ten step qualification process in order to make it compatible with IT infrastructure/business applications. Members from individual departments can put forward their key issues during project implementation to MIMO working group, and other (more experienced) members try to help them.
MIMO is also in-charge of activities like testing and application of security patches, coordinating inter-departmental communications, maintaining relationships with open-source software vendors, integrators, service providers and community members, in order to identify and solve (any) critical issues.
Read this article if you want to know more about MIMO and their tryst with open-source office productivity suit(s).
LibreOffice, in a recent press release, has announced that MIMO has joined The Document Foundation’s advisory board and they have been contributing to the development of Libre Office code.
In other news, The Document Foundation has announced the release of the latest LibreOffice version – LibreOffice 4.0.4.
excITingIP.com
You could stay up to date on the various Computer Networking/IT technologies & News by subscribing to this blog with your email address in the sidebar box that says, ‘Get email updates when new articles are published’