[ossig] Study: Danish Gov't Can Save With OpenOffice

[Ditesh Kumar]

>From http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=25503

Study: Danish Gov't Can Save With OpenOffice
OCT 04, 2006 10:59:35 AM | View/Add Comments (1) | Permalink

The Danish government could save about 125 million Danish kroner (US$21
million) over the next five years if it adopted the OpenOffice.org
productivity software instead of upgrading to Microsoft’s Office 2007
suite. Doing nothing could save it even more, according to a study by
consultancy Ramboll Management.

Ramboll compared the cost of different ways of implementing the Danish
Parliament’s June 2 decision that government institutions exchanging
information digitally with citizens or companies must do so in file
formats based on open standards from Jan. 1, 2008. The Danish Open
Source Business Association commissioned the report, which was published
in Danish in August. An English version of the report was linked from
the OpenOffice.org website last week.

Adam Lebech, head of office at the Danish National IT and Telecom
Agency, welcomed the debate the report had started, but warned that the
numbers did not tell the whole story.

"It’s very difficult to make these calculations because you have to make
a lot of assumptions," he said Wednesday.

"The report doesn’t look at savings from open standards; it only looks
at costs. ... It’s not a business case," he said.

The report examined the cost of switching the exchange of documentation
to two possible open standard document formats: Office Open XML and
OpenDocument Format (ODF).

Microsoft developed the Office Open XML file format for its Office 2007
software suite, and proposed it to European standards body ECMA
International for standardization. In late August, an ECMA technical
committee chaired by Microsoft was still discussing draft version 1.4 of
the specification, whereas the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) approved the rival ODF standard in May. ODF is the
format used by open-source software suite OpenOffice.org, and also by
proprietary software including Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice and IBM’s
WorkPlace.

Ramboll estimated the cost of two ways the government could switch its
document exchange to Office Open XML: by using free file translation
tools Microsoft has said it will provide for existing versions of its
Office software, or by upgrading to Office 2007 when it becomes
available. For ODF, Ramboll compared the cost of migrating to
OpenOffice.org software, or of using file translators, still in
development, to open and save ODF documents from within Microsoft
Office.

It concluded that if the government continued its policy of
progressively upgrading to newer versions of Microsoft Office, the cost
of licensing and installing the upgrades, and switching document
exchange to the Office Open XML format, would cost about 380 million
kroner. The cost of continuing to upgrade Microsoft Office while
switching to ODF would be slightly more, because of greater file
conversion and support costs. 

Migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org, while switching to
ODF, would cost around 255 million kroner, Ramboll said. 

The cheapest route, at 105 million kroner, would be to adopt Office Open
XML but to stick with the versions of Microsoft Office already in use,
primarily Office XP and 2003, Ramboll said. Sticking with current
versions of the software and switching to ODF would cost marginally
more.

The report, "Estimating the Costs of Implementing Office OpenXML and ODF
in the Central Government," is available in English from Danish Open
Source Business Association.

-Peter Sayer, IDG News Service (Paris Bureau)