The UK’s beautiful, Plone-based Open Source Academy website exists to help migrate government agencies to cost-effective, stable and powerful open source software tools. “Our aim is to encourage the use of Open Source Software by local authorities through knowledge sharing and practical advice. The content of our portal, as well as our one-to-one services, can help you economise on costs and increase Open Source’s implementation efficiency.”

Bristol‘s 5,500-PC StarOffice migration (saving 60% over using Microsoft Office) is the current big news over there. “The decision was taken following a full evaluation of the costs and benefits of both platforms that included staff retraining, migration and support costs of switching the 5,500 users from a mixture of predominantly Microsoft systems to StarOffice.”

“So far, the experience of migrating users has proved that the cost of migration is low and ease of use is high. We now have concrete evidence that less effort is required to deploy the software, support and train users than we estimated,” said Gavin Beckett.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 at 10:39 am and is filed under Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.