A UK government's decicion to use ODF (Open Document Format) for its electronic documents, would help public administrations overcome vendor lock-in for office applications, says Liam Maxwell, councillor for Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead.
He says the move will start the process to the billions of savings that British government needs to find in unproductive areas of spending.
According to Maxwell, the borough wants to start using OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools on many of its 1400 workstations. It also wants to increase the use of free Internet-based office tools. "We are slowly moving our councillors over to use Google-docs."
A test with OpenOffice showed users would have little trouble to switch, says Maxwell. "And our help desk expects to have fewer support issues with OpenOffice."
However, the switch to OpenOffice has been put on hold, for some of the critical applications used by the borough's administration are programmed to work only with the office suite from a single proprietary vendor. "The application that helps our civil administrators draft building permits, for example, is hard-coded to use Microsoft Office. The only practical way to change this, is for the government to demand the use of ODF, that's the only way the third party vendors will change."
Public administrations combining alternative office tools using ODF with desktop virtualisation, could save billions, Maxwell estimates. At the moment, a desktop in the borough costs around 345 GBP (about 419 Euro) a year and desktops in use by the central government cost between 800 and 1600 GBP a year. "With ODF and virtualisation we could bring this down to 200 or 300 GBP without the security layer, but we don't think that's going to be more than 200 GBP per workstation in all but those 5 percent in the most sensitive locations"
Virtualisation would allow the borough to make the proprietary office tools easily available only to those few administrators that actually needed it. "So we would pay for applications like we pay for the use of telephony, on a price per day."