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On Mon, 2008-01-07 at 21:47 +0000, Henry Bremridge wrote: > The council should at the very least be prepared to state > - What discount rate was used to derive the present value of future MS payments > - What future payments are expected > - The expected cost of a onetime conversion (on MS windows) to OpenOffice Did I send you this? I got it from the County Treasurer. Perhaps you would comment. "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, it makes good business sense in relation to compatibility, integration, supportability, and affordability to be standardising on Microsoft. 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. 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. 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. 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 propose to write back next week. -- james kilty http://www.kilty.demon.co.uk -- 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