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On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 15:45 +0000, james kilty wrote: > Brian/Eric > > The council has a standard of using market leading products which are > seen to provide value for money and are sustainable. > > No one can argue with the market position of Microsoft, and when looking > at the core set of tools our staff need access to in order to perform > their core role What are these core tools? Communications - email? I think we've got that covered. Word processing? Yep. Spreadsheeting? Yep. Databasing... well, we haven't really got "Access" covered, but who in their right mind would really want to? Besides, my experience with Council employees is that they either use "the database" (which is, by their descriptions, just a frontend to some something else, so they wouldn't really need any retraining if the backend changed from Access to SQL so long as the frontend was close-enough to their "old" one) or they use spreadsheets, so I doubt there is a large body that *needs* Access. > it makes good business sense in relation to > compatibility, integration, supportability, and affordability to be > standardising on Microsoft. Compatibility? With who? With yourselves in 15 years time? Not too sure about how Microsoft feel about that. Integration into what? Supportability... personally I wouldn't want to have to support a system that so clearly has a UseBy date on it that's only a few years away. Affordability? They will have to retrain their staff in MSOffice 2007 anyway, so why not bite the bullet and retrain them in software that already looks and feels 99% like "the old stuff" anyway, and in all likelihood is using a file-format that will outlive Microsoft's DocX 'standard'. DeFacto standards come and go, real ones don't. Look at TCP/IP - it's been around for donkey's years and is still going strong. SMTP? That's been around for what, 25 years? It's still here! I doubt whether a PST file from the *original* Outlook would still work in Outlook 07. > Of the 7 council organisations in Cornwall, > 6 are using the Microsoft product set. Penwith are the only exception to > this, and they have had considerable issues in responding to change and > communicating with other local and national organisations, such that > they were planning to move to a Microsoft platform. Penwith, as far as I was aware, were not having "considerable issues in responding to change" - teething problems which have settled down. And as for the Communication thing - a free download (see below) and/or 10mins of tuition sorts this out. 1 "council organisation" out of 7... so that what, just under 14%? I wonder if they would listen if the same proportion of voters made a fuss over this? > Whilst the up front costs of a Microsoft Desktop compared to it's > Freeware Linux counterpart may appear to favour the Linux route, the > total cost of ownership would show a different picture. The additional > work required on the Linux platform to create an integrated set of > tools, which is out of the box functionality for Mirosoft would very > quickly overtake any initial purchase savings, as has been experienced > by Penwith. This is outside of the argument for the business to be able > to quickly respond to changing needs. TCO? Does the Council not *have* to keep all paperwork (either dead-tree wise, or electronically) for a *long* time? Might want to question how much it would "cost" them (or is that how much it'd cost us, as taxpayers) for an inability to reliably retrieve and view documents from Microsoft Office versions of yesteryear. > > The council does not rely entirely on the use of Microsoft products, and > have Unix and Linux systems deployed to run some of the most critical > database systems used in the authority. The council uses the right tool > for the right job - the Microsoft platform on the desktop where > interoperability and flexibility is required, and Linux to run the > council's largest databases where security and performance is critical. Oh, great... the ol' "We use Unix/Linux for our databases... aren't we clever?" line. > As a footnote, early tests for the latest release of the Office product > shows that when using the compatibility download, there is forward and > backward compatibility for files created in either Office 2002, 2003, or > 2007. The council has seamlessly and automatically deployed this > compatibility pack to all of its computers. I thought there was a free downloadable "addon" for MSOffice 03/07 that allowed it to read/write OpenDoc files... it was just not particularly well advertised by Microsoft. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html