Dutch City of Haarlem migrates to OpenOffice

Earlier this year, the city was faced with an annual bill of about 500 000 Euro in licensing fees related to an upgrade from Microsoft Office 97, which accounted for the majority of its office productivity software. The city decided to investigate alternatives, and conducted a detailed function-per-function study comparing the features of OpenOffice.org (v1.1) with Microsoft Office 2000 in order to evaluate alternative upgrade paths.

Jan van de Straat, Director of R&D for the City, and the external IT consultants conducting the study found that OpenOffice did not lack any functionality that was used and needed by the City’s employees. The main issue was the compatibility between the file formats of OpenOffice and Microsoft products, but this was not a problem for the majority of applications used. The main problem was that previously developed customised applications expect Microsoft Office (Word, in particular). Therefore, for the moment the City continues to use Microsoft Office as well as OpenOffice.

The city found its costs for training, development and migration to OpenOffice to be 50 000 euro, roughly 90% lower than its licence costs for an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2000.

Haarlem also uses GNU/Linux on its servers, and has studied the migration of its desktops as well. Mr van de Straat said that the City could move 20% of its desktops to Linux without any migration problems caused to employees.

With regards to open standards, Haarlem has decided that all new software purchases must use open standards, such as XML.