Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major savings

https://www.collaboraoffice.com/government-open-source-office-deal-set-to-provide-major-savings.php

by buovjaga • 11 years ago

90 67 11 years ago

douche2• 11 years ago

I honestly wonder if there is actually going to be any cost savings, once training and the friction of converting existing work-flows over from MS Office to LibreOffice are taken into account.

Unless OpenOffice/LibreOffice has gotten markedly better in the last couple of years since I got access to an MSDN subscription, it's still a second-tier product behind Office. I hate to say that, because I'm no great fan of desktop Word and Excel (I still think the 2003 editions were the best), but MS has really picked up the ball with their cloud versions integrated into Office365, which IMO, are better than Google Docs at this point.

creshal2• 11 years ago

I honestly wonder if there is actually going to be any cost savings, once training and the friction of converting existing work-flows over from MS Office to LibreOffice are taken into account.

Anecdotally, a frighteningly large part of the civil service's workflow is implemented in Excel/Word macros. If that's true, it won't matter how good LibreOffice is, migrating that to anything else is going to be the biggest pain (and cost) point.

chris_wot10• 11 years ago

That's a cost and a vendor lockin that will need to be addressed at some point regardless. Governments of all stripes are trying to migrate away from proprietary things like this as it's a risk to governance.

Perhaps the next great push should not be file formats (this is largely won now IMO) but to create a standard for Office scripting languages and document automation within government?

mtgx• 11 years ago

Still better than having your government locked-in with a single vendor, where the vendor is a mega-corporation from another company that may or may not be your ally at all times.

Also what happens with the archived files and documents decades later? Will they still work? Microsoft can't even achieve 100% percent compatibility between its released versions every 3 years.

There will be some transition pains, that's for sure, and in part those pains are as big as they are because the governments have adopted single-vendor proprietary products from companies for many years to begin with. It seems to me the long term upside is way bigger with open standards and open source software.

bardworx• 11 years ago

Still better than having your government locked-in with a single vendor, where the vendor is a mega-corporation from another company that may or may not be your ally at all times.

I think you meant to say country.

There will be some transition pains, that's for sure, and in part those pains are as big as they are because the governments have adopted single-vendor proprietary products from companies for many years to begin with. It seems to me the long term upside is way bigger with open standards and open source software.

I would be curious to see how the finances work over the long haul; this year they might not save a whole bunch but what about over a five year term?

madez• 11 years ago

Hello douche,

I don’t know whether the step to libre software will save costs. Nonetheless, I’d still argue for the government to take it, for even if it were costly, taking things for the team is part of the reason of a governments existence.

hahainternet• 11 years ago

MS has really picked up the ball with their cloud versions integrated into Office365, which IMO, are better than Google Docs at this point.

What format can I export them in?

creshal2• 11 years ago

OOXML. It's open! It's XML! That's like twice as universally compatible! /s

gtk40• 11 years ago

Expert options are OOXML and ODF. You can choose your default.

I find import/export of ODF is better than LibreOffice import/export of OOXML, FWIW.

vincentkriek• 11 years ago

I agree with you that they probably will not save money and I also agree with you that Word and Excel are the better products. However, I do like that there is money going from government to Open Source software. I know a lot will get stuck in consulting firms but this is bound to improve LibreOffice and I believe it's better to use public money to improve open source projects than it is to pay Microsoft and keep getting sucked into their ecosystem.

Public money should be spent on open (source) software. File formats should be exchangeable and switching providers shouldn't be intentionally difficult.

moonchrome2• 11 years ago

Public money should be spent on open (source) software

I agree but only if the costs are reasonably comparable. For example if there's a commercial product that would cost 10x to replace then I don't think that's appropriate use of public money.

But if the costs are similar then OSS should always be prefered because it creates new value for other users and while a commercial entity can't necessarily capitalize on that value governments don't need to.

rm_-rf_slash2• 11 years ago

The software may be open source but the support isn't. One of the reasons that Microsoft's office suite has been such a successful product over the years is because it just works.

One of the few correct statements Ayn Rand ever made was that when the age of money ends, it will usher in the age of pull. If you support someone that advocates a technological overhaul and it doesn't pay off, then you'll be left holding the bag. Not all politics in government happens on Capitol Hill.

JupiterMoon2• 11 years ago

If existing work flows are based around e.g. using Excel macros as data analysis programs or Excel spreadsheets as databases would it not be better to convert these work flows to programs and databases and leave office type programs to do what they are actually designed for i.e. document creation and quick one off data manipulation.

blumkvist• 11 years ago

Yeah I too doubt the cost savings, especially when you put the cost of switching back to MS office in 12-18 months.

ZeroGravitas• 11 years ago

They probably save money on this, just because of leverage in negotiations with a credible threat of walking away from the deal with Microsoft.

dogma11383• 11 years ago

Germany tried that, in the end they've spent more money on migrating to OpenOffice and then even more money on migrating back.

This is also the case of every company I've seen that decided to migrate away from windows based workstations to Linux ones.

They've spent a fuckload of money on porting their tools, training, hiring linux support guys for end-user related tiers and then still nothing worked like they've planned.

Also Office is pretty much free in the enterprise world you pay pretty much absolutely nothing for it the majority of the costs go into CAL costs mainly for Exchange which you'll use Outlook to access. Even if you do not use Outlook to access exchange you'll still pay for those CAL's just that the pricing will not go through the office license but now through the Exchange one, same thing goes if you are using SharePoint for collaboration etc.

If all of a sudden you stop using office and you don't pay those 93.4$ Band-E prices per installation or w/e you'll notice your exchange License pricing to go up the next day to accommodate for the built-in CAL license in office which you do not get with 3rd party software.

vidarh3• 11 years ago

Even if they spend exactly the same amounts, if that money goes to training and consulting within the UK, the government still gains from it as a substantial proportion will go straight back into the treasury in the form of taxes, so the cost to convert would have to be substantially higher before MS Office would be the most economical choice. There's of course still the chance that might be the case.

pbhjpbhj2• 11 years ago

Assuming the consultants are UK taxpayers - the company is an international private company so taxable profits are presumably being offshored, but hopefully there's local employment of UK nationals too.

I've never understood why government wouldn't develop their own consultants for this sort of thing, governments often have highways agencies - the modern equivalent for communications would surely be an IT agency. In the UK we have a Department of Transport but we don't have a Department of ITC, the later seems as important a part of modern infrastructure.

There's got to be a lot of moral pressure internally - for those in control - in a company like Collabora to introduce bugs given they make their money on bug fixes. It seems government wide that purchasing the software as open source and training civil servants on the code would be highly effective in securing systems for future use?

Presumably the modifications to LibreOffice will be open source, SS 3, 3.1 here http://www.libreoffice.org/download/license/ appear to require it?

chris_wot10• 11 years ago

Things have improved remarkably :-) I was doing some dev work as an intern for Collabora for a few months, and during that time there were a whole range of performance and compatibility fixes to allow for interoperability between MS Office and LibreOffice.

However, what you are missing is that the UK government has its own cloud agreements called G-Cloud agreements, which are part of a larger G-Cloud Framework. [1]

Microsoft has in fact been ahead of the curve on this, having already gotten accredited to IL3 levels.[2] However, Collabora are already doing deals with the UK government, and many other firms, so if they are going to implement a cloud platform then they will need to have a good story around their own accreditation so they can be part of the UK government's Digital Marketplace.

I'm very impressed with the UK Government's attempts at breaking out of vendor lockin with their new platforms. It seems to me they've made things fairly easy, and they even host their accreditation questions for G-Cloud 6 in GitHub. [3]

1. https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/framew...

2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/01/gcloud_rules_respect...

3. https://github.com/alphagov/supplier-submission-portal

danmaz74• 11 years ago

If money from governments starts flowing to LibreOffice development, I would expect it to improve quickly to fill the needs of said governments.

jenscow• 11 years ago

I still think the 2003 editions were the best

Yet LibreOffice is said to be comparable to that version.

copsarebastards• 11 years ago

I honestly wonder if there is actually going to be any cost savings, once training and the friction of converting existing work-flows over from MS Office to LibreOffice are taken into account.

Sure, if you only care about quarterly costs, this is far more expensive. Luckily it seems they are not so short-sighted.

Of course it's going to be costly to switch. That's a key part of proprietary software strategy. But in the long run, the lower costs will far outweigh that initial cost. And furthermore, if many governments switch to and fund free software, it should be easy for free software to surpass proprietary software, and do so at a lower cost.

Government switching to free software has implications that go far beyond cost-savings. There are features money can't buy: proprietary software is so frequently backdoored that it's safe to assume it's all backdoored, and that security risk is huge for governments. And putting government documents in a non-proprietary file format allows accessibility, which is a key responsibility of governments serving their citizens.

keithpeter2• 11 years ago

Cost of client machines?

The company are quoting Pentium compatible processor, 512Mb RAM and a 1024x768 screen as the minimum spec. For applications that don't need all the bells and whistles this could mean not spending money this year or next year on new machines. That could be important in the UK context.

Spooky23• 11 years ago

Microsoft is breaking the really old and nasty stuff anyway, so it's not that big of a deal.

Also, whose office suite is "better" doesn't matter. Can the software meet the task? Thats it... nobody cares if a government worker like Excel.

Exploring this stuff is automatically a cost-savings activity, because Microsoft will run around like chickens to save the business. You may end up getting significant concessions on Office just for asking the question.

wyldfire• 11 years ago

MS Office is likely superior to LibreOffice in terms of feature set. But as long as LibreOffice is reliable it likely satisfies the vast majority of Word/Excel users' needs.

Excavator• 11 years ago

MS has really picked up the ball with their cloud versions integrated into Office365, which IMO, are better than Google Docs at this point.

Which parts of their product have you been using exactly? One can't even deselect cells in Excel, instead it will add the same cell a second time (while adding another layer of the darkening effect).

There have been other things but thankfully those haven't been stupid enough to get stuck in my head like that one.

fpp• 11 years ago

Within the last 3 years a lot of UK government agencies and related organisations have learn the true MS Windows TCO the hard way.

It was not only the MS upgrade / new licensing terms & cost increases that hit some of them pretty hard, it was also the end of life for MS Windows versions (XP, servers) and that many have outsourced their IT services / departments to 3rd party providers like CapGemini, Accenture, CGI etc.

This year e.g. with the EOL of Windows 2003 server, we have heard the word "extortion" quite a few times too often with some of the agencies.

To start with, the migration of a MS Win 2003 server to e.g. MS Win 2008 R2 or 2012 can easily take 20+days.

Now multiply this with £1K p/d, plus 3rd party service uplifts, training etc.

When you look at a larger scale data-intensive agency (10k+ staff) you are talking 800-1k+ servers running MS Windows. Only a fraction of those requiring an upgrade - e.g. 70-100 - already means £Millions. The licensing cost within that are of course marginal compared to the overall TCO. What is hitting the hardest is that the 3rd party suppliers will treat the new OS versions as a "different" OS. Such migrations (MS 2003 server, like with XP to Win7) require that quite some of the legacy software running on those servers has to be upgraded / needs new service contracts / does not immediately run / has to be fully re-tested. Plus new HW of course (not included in above cost).

Similar can be said for the XP to Win7 upgrade. While there are some automation tools to test your end user application estate (larger agencies have / had 800+ "standard" applications installed) a good estimate for such a multi-year upgrade programme is in the region of £3-5M+ for 12-15k end user computers. Windows licensing costs within these figures are marginal (e.g. 5-10%) or even included within the new HW that will cost on top of this migration (est. £600 * 8-10k+ -> £6M+ computers over 3-5y). These numbers go up substantially if you are upgrading high-security environments.

These figures are for mid-size / larger UK agencies with annual IT budgets in the region of £200-300M+ - the largest UK agencies / government departments have £1B+ annual IT budgets. The situation with local government is completely different - they have to calculate with "every penny", often have only a few £M annual budgets, not having these "favourable" MS licensing terms (heard about massive increases in the last years for local governments), are already overstretched in their other budget areas - as a result of IT cost increase they will often have to cut services elsewhere. FYI, MS is much better in this arena - as for example - Oracle. There was a case documented this year when Oracle sent a UK local government a £600M annual licensing bill (increase)- Oracle, after this "shock therapy" then normally negotiates & settles for a much lower sum. Oracle claims to have an almost 80% profit margin with these kind of "licensing deals".

Hope these real-world figures help to better understand where the issues are. The main cost - IMHO - are with the way how IT is delivered & serviced (3rd party at very high cost), constant changes in licensing terms for smaller to mid-size organisations, application licensing for specific MS Win versions, end of life of core IT building blocks vs continuity and gradual upgrades. If only a fraction of these amounts go into improving (end-user) open source solutions, we will have a boost in usability & features with most of these solutions. Additionally in these cases those improvements can then be shared across all government agencies, in the UK & world-wide. In the moment each improvement or application adaptation is always charged for multiple times (within the larger gov.agency scenario often by the same 3rd party suppliers).

It would be great if someone in those government agencies would document these actual cost and Central Gov would collect this data e.g. for base-lining against e.g. Linux (there are e.g. already thousands of Linux / Unix servers running within UK government agencies).

As with the Munich example mentioned a few time in this discussion, the above numbers / ballparks would have to be used for true comparison as Munich would have had to upgrade from XP to Win7 and also face the whole server upgrade scenarios. Instead much lower MS upgrade costs have been used and most importantly - upgrades required to all the (end user) applications, forms, macros & services that would most likely also have been required within the MS Win upgrades XP -> Win7, are now being told as Linux specific cost.

lifeisstillgood2• 11 years ago

Do we still care about anything other than excel? And we care about excel because it is far and away the best fastest and most robust spreadsheet out there.

This focus on office applications as the way in for Open Source software seems to me like transforming 19th Century transport by building faster horses.

vidarh3• 11 years ago

Who are "we"?

It's been a decade since I've worked anywhere were anyone cared about Excel. I realize that I'm working in a "bubble" given the type of companies I tend to work with, but it does clearly illustrate that, yes, there are certainly people and companies that care about spreadsheets other than Excel.

lifeisstillgood2• 11 years ago

Excel is cared about a lot in some industries - finance it is still running huge amounts of the workflow (from hedge funds to major banks whose auditors pull their hair out)

The main point I'm making is that of the troika of office applications, only the spreadsheet still has value. I suspect I could teach everyone Markdown far faster and with better outcomes than teach Word users to move to (open office equivalent)

It's something about software literacy - you just don't need Word anymore.

chris_wot10• 11 years ago

Actually, there are a whole raft of issues you are conflating here. You need to ask why Excel is so widely used. It is used as:

Use Case 1: A basic spreadsheet for data manipulation, with no extensive macros or VBA involved. People use it for vlookups and other formulas they find useful.

Use Case 2: As a statistical analysis tool to crunch data.

Use Case 3: As a software platform, making extensive use of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

So here are the issues I have with your statement that Excel "is far and away the best, fastest and most robust spreadsheet out there"...

Fallacy 1: Excel is the best technical option

Excel is not necessarily the fastest spreadsheet out there for all operations. In many cases I believe it is still very fast, and beats LibreOffice under certain document loads, but this is often not by much and in fact there is ongoing work towards locating problem documents and profiling of LibreOffice code to remove bottlenecks. In fact, in LO 4.2 many performance bottlenecks were largely solved. [1]

At this point, I do think it's largely a myth that Calc is dreadfully slow. Even if it should be found that there are performance issues, however, I know that the LO community, and in particular Collabora, have a good story around their ability to use valgrind to benchmark and analyze results. As a normal part of development work, Collabora are often provided with documents that they analyse and contribute performance improvements into the core LO code base.

There are many, many errors in even basic statistical functions in most spreadsheet applications, but Microsoft Excel is particularly egregious. However, IMO the LO devs are more thorough when it comes to this [2][3]. So for use case 2 (statistical work) then I think it's not suitable (actually, for any stats work, why not just use R?)

So if Excel is not necessarily better than Calc in terms of performance, accuracy or overall robustness (you might want to look at a feature comparison here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr... - quite informative I think!) then really the issue is that it's being used as a platform for VBA development.

---

Fallacy 2: Excel is the best integrated option for office application development work

So now here is the rub: this has been something causing Microsoft vendor lockin for years. Expertise in financial firms around Excel is very high, and often quite extensive custom "solutions" are based on Excel spreadsheets, but almost always via VBA.

But... Microsoft's VBA diverged from Visual Basic in VB6, and Microsoft have been struggling to know what to about it ever since. I point out that they removed support for VBA in Office 2008 for OS X, but then had to put it back in due to market demands in Office 2012, and I also note that the only update to VBA7 is to introduce actual pointers.

So basically, this will only be a competitive advantage for so long for Microsoft. As the marketplace starts to open up - and it is! - firms will be looking for solutions that either do NOT rely on Excel or VBA and that can integrate with better scripting languages, like Python.

In fact, I've been hearing that a lot of financial institutions are getting quite concerned with data silos: these are usually in Excel, haven't been audited, aren't integrated into the business' DW, are isolated and thus cause problems with transparency and decision making, and are almost NEVER documented meaning that should the maintainer leave then that spreadsheet will either be used and unmaintained, or will need to be redeveloped anyway.

So really, the key advantage Excel has is ubiquity, and really only then because of VBA, but that's a double-edged sword and eventually businesses will migrate away from it.

1. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.2#Perform...

2. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2013-April...

3. So far as I'm aware, Excel's RNG is now using The Mersenne Twister algorithm in Excel 2010 and beyond, but that's not officially confirmed from Microsoft. It's very hard to be certain of what is being used without such a confirmation, and given that Microsoft has form in releasing a flawed RNG update already (which they never got around to fixing for years and years!) I don't know how you could consider Excel to be "more robust" than LibreOffice.

greggyb4• 11 years ago

I'm not disagreeing with what you've included above, but I'd like to add a fourth, new use case.

Excel is increasingly being used as Microsoft's gateway drug to an excellent self-service BI platform, Power BI. There is incredible power in providing a smooth (and approaching seamless) upgrade path from workbook with embedded queries, to a proper dimensional modelling tool (Power Pivot, AKA SSAS Tabular columnstore engine), to a proper dashboard visualization tool (Power View), to a hosted, centralized team solution (Power BI portal - mobile app batteries included), to an on prem enterprise-grade analysis engine (SSAS Tabular).

Again, this is not a refutation, but a new use case and powerful new functionality to address the concerns you raised in Fallacy 2.

vidarh3• 11 years ago

Let's be clear on what this release says, and what it doesn't:

1. Collabora Office's solutions will be available via G-Cloud Digital Marketplace. That's a big win for them as it makes it easy for government agencies to chose them.

2. There's no mention of displacing Microsoft Office, other than to the extent Collabora manages to convince individual government organizations to make the switch.

3. There's the vague claim that Collabra will work together with the Crown Commercial Service to raise awareness about ODF and their solution. Notably absent is any kind of comment from the Crown Commercial Service or any government agency. This may mean a quite big push (but if so, where are the bigwigs making statements?) or it could mean they get to be included in a newsletter or something, or anything in between...

If there had been some deal to do a massive conversion away from MS Office, you can bet that would been made very, very clear.

Asbostos• 11 years ago

It'll be great if Collabora is going to fix some of the notorious bugs that workers will inevitably come across like having the pictures deleted from their documents or their page layout silently changed.

keithpeter2• 11 years ago

I'd be very interested in bug numbers for those.

Not challenging, I use [open|libre] a lot for writing course guides and presentations and I'm sending other people stacks of .odt/.odp stuff and they are getting interested in being able to edit the material.

a3n• 11 years ago

The way to actually save money, if that's the goal, is to try not to want full-fledged word processors and office suites.

For most internal communication, plain text or something like RTF at most is more than sufficient.

Trying to replace Word and Office with cheaper or open is doomed, because Office is far ahead of everything else, and everything else will be judged for not being Office.

Open source's best contribution could be a standardized simple text format.

Doctor_Fegg• 11 years ago

For most communication, full stop. I edited a news-stand magazine with TextEdit on the Mac for several years (Apple's bundled text editor, speaks RTF). I found that the complexities of Word just got in the way, and the InDesign guys liked receiving consistently, minimally marked-up text.

kylex• 11 years ago

Interesting, but I question the how much this will cost to change over considering training and current workflows on Microsoft Platforms.

Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major savings

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