BE: Anderlecht, Charleroi and Vorst move to OpenOffice
The administration of the Belgian city of Anderlecht last month completed its move to OpenOffice, which is now installed on all of its 600 desktop PCs. The cities of Charleroi and Vorst are also moving to OpenOffice.
Anderlecht is the first major town in Belgium to successfully complete the move to this open source office productivity suite, the city council said in a statement on 21 April. "The transition to free software obviously helps to reduce costs, by saving on the purchase of licenses. Especially, it results in more independence from suppliers and in the use of open standards for exchanging information."
According to the Belgian IT news magazine Datanews, moving to OpenOffice saved Anderlecht 250,000 euro that it otherwise would have spent on proprietary software licences.
Datanews also reports that the city of Charleroi has now moved half of its 1600 PCs to OpenOffice. Charleroi is also using the open source database PostgreSQL to replace the proprietary Microsoft Access.
The migrations to OpenOffice in Anderlecht, Charleroi and Vorst are supported by the Brussels Regional Informatics Centre (CIRB). This organisation assists in installation and testing, helps to migrate macros and offers training for end-users. According to a presentation by the CIRB for the city of Anderlecht, conversion of macros is taking longer than initially foreseen. CIRB had planned to have completed this in December, but work on the macros is still ongoing.
CIRB says the default document type in Anderlecht will be the open document format ODF. If documents are sent to recipients outside the administration, they will be saved as PDF, another open document standard, unless these recipients are asked to make changes. In that case the documents will be saved in a proprietary office format.
More information:
Data news item on Anderlecht (in Dutch)
Data news item on Charleroi (in Dutch)
CIRB presentation (in French, pdf)
CIRB presentation (in Dutch, pdf)
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