(The same city which proved that OpenOffice leads to huge savings [1,2].
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| As part of its drive to reduce the cost of services without
| compromising quality, Bristol City Council today joined the Open
| Document Format (ODF) Alliance. The move is expected to make it easier
| to share documents in different formats and avoid the frustrating 'can't
| open yours' culture, which slows down work.
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http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/6656
[1] "As a user of a range of software solutions, Bristol's council has always
committed itself to finding the right solution for the right problem and
trying to deliver that solution at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO)
possible. As a primary user of Microsoft Office, the council saw the change
in licensing policy at Microsoft as an opportunity to explore the options
available to possibly unify its computing into a software standard."
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2006/02/23/bristol_migration.html
[2] "Bristol calculated a five-year total cost of ownership of £670,010 for
StarOffice, compared with £1,706,684 for Microsoft Office. This was
despite budgeting half as much in implementation and support costs
for Microsoft because many users were already on its systems.
The difference may turn out to be even greater, says IT strategy team
leader Gavin Beckett. "We discovered that things were simpler than we
thought they'd be," he says of the switch. "We always argued that a lot
of the risk was perceived risk, rather than real risk."
Deployment of StarOffice has cost £10,000 rather than a budgeted £87,000,
as Bristol found it could re-use an existing tool. In addition, most
staff have needed 30 to 60 minutes of re-training rather than the
planned day's-worth."
http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,,1786068,00.html
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