Bologna achieves vendor independence for its office applications

The administration of the Italian city of Bologna has almost completed its move to OpenOffice. Most of the 3600 PCs now run this open source suite of office applications. The administration is planning to move more applications to open source, aiming to become less dependent on specific IT vendors.

This municipality started its first open source pilot in 2004. It now plans to include free and open source software in all parts of its IT infrastructure, and says this will result in significant cost savings.

“We spent 570,000 euro on proprietary office licences in 2006. Next year, however, we expect to save some 160,000 euro “, says Massimo Carnevali, IT manager of the municipality.

Carnevali was one of the speakers at the LinuxDay conference in Bologna on 26 October. He also presented at the OpenOffice conference in Orvieto last month.

In both presentations, he outlined Bologna’s free and open source strategy. Apart from vendor independence and cost savings, the important goals are to increase cooperation with other public administrations, to reuse software that is developed by other public bodies and to make sure the municipality’s data will always be accessible by moving to open document standards. Continue reading at Open Source Observatory & Repository Europe.