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The city of Münster has started a pilot using OpenOffice in schools. The city's IT department, Citeq, will also switch all of the 150 servers used in its primary and secondary schools to GNU/Linux. Half of these have already been migrated to open source.

The changes in the school's IT systems are part of the overall IT strategy of the city's IT Department.

At the moment, teachers are trying out OpenOffice in two schools. The suite will be made available to all schools in November 2009. "We plan to make OpenOffice the default office application for schools", said Citeq's spokesperson Stefan Schoenfelder.

During September 2009, the city reported that 140 of its 360 servers are running GNU/Linux. In a press statement published on 23 September 2009, Citeq stated that using open source is making it easier for the departments to share information.

Citeq furthermore indicates that the administration is also saving considerable costs. "Open source tools such as Linux are mature, so we consider their use as very economical."

Münster is using a mix of Suse and Debian Gnu/Linux for its servers. These are used for instance as files servers, or for running the Typo3 open source content management system. Schoenfelder said that they also use it for proprietary systems of database management and Enterprise resource planning (ERP).  

Desktop

There are no plans yet to run complete open source desktops in the city. Schoenfelder: "The staff is used to working with proprietary office applications, here as well as at home. Moreover, there are many applications available only on proprietary office applications desktops, and it would cost too much to move these to Linux."

The city of Münster started using open source in 1998. The first Linux server was a mail relay, running Sendmail. The decision to use open source was made by the IT department. Politicians want to increase the city's use of open source. "We now use Linux wherever it makes economic sense. We use it wherever possible and whenever the efforts for changing the operating system are not higher than the cost reduction that can be achieved."