French taxman opts for OpenOffice

The Direction Generale des Impots, which manages the taxes of all states and cities in France, plans to deploy the open-source office productivity application OpenOffice.org on thousands of its PCs. In an ZDNet UK interview published Wednesday, Jean-Marie Lapeyre, the chief technical officer at the French tax agency, said it plans to migrate 80,000 desktops from Microsoft Office 97 to OpenOffice.org next year.

The migration is expected to cut the agency's costs by 29.3 million euros, or $34.5 million, compared with the cost of switching to Office XP. The agency has calculated that it will only take three man-years to be "completely independent" of Microsoft Office, Lapeyre said. It may also consider migrating to Linux desktops in the future, although Lapeyre said this would require much more work.

Ingrid Marson of ZDNet UK reported from London.

French Tax Man heh

A lot of companies are jumping into the open source market. Being an IT Professional since 1991 I have a lot of experience deploying new software in large 10,000 environments. Large corporations really need to look at the long term return on investment. Migrating 80,000 pc's to any product will have huge time constraints on the IT Staff. There will be troubleshooting, compatibility issues not to mention training. No tech support for large issues isn't a good plan. Small businesses can gain a lot from open source government and large corps to stay competitive should really stick with a product that has a dedicated support staff. As well less # of vendors installed to your pc is always better. More vendors more grief...

[No invasion of privacy]

They will be moving to new software anyway...

Read the article - the choice is between upgrading to
OpenOffice.org or to Office XP, so that deployment to 80 000
computers is going to have to occur anyway. The difference is
that, though there is likely to be a little bit more user support
required for using OpenOffice.org (though not a lot - it is very
comparable to MS Office 97) which will cost more to offer, the
savings made on not upgrading to XP will allow for this in
spades.

[linuxbeatsMS]

OpenOffice gaining Live Office announcement dud

It is interesting to see the traction that OpenOffice is recieving in the marketplace. It is by-large not the Fortune 500 companies but the SME market with a smattering of 'notable' migrations. Interesting, what is 'notable' for the press may be these larger poster-children deals. What is 'notable' in the market is the broader adoption of OpenOffice through many organizations. The applications are now of relative equivalency and you have companies like http://www.projity.com that has an equivalent for Microsoft Project. They are not open source but it makes the point again that their are alternatives that have equivalent functionality, can open MS file formats and are cross platform. We have a negative inflection point for Microsoft at this time !