Government Open Source Office deal set to provide major savings

Anecdotally, a frighteningly large part of the civil service's workflow is implemented in Excel/Word macros. If that's true, it won't matter how good LibreOffice is, migrating that to anything else is going to be the biggest pain (and cost) point.

Also what happens with the archived files and documents decades later? Will they still work? Microsoft can't even achieve 100% percent compatibility between its released versions every 3 years.

There will be some transition pains, that's for sure, and in part those pains are as big as they are because the governments have adopted single-vendor proprietary products from companies for many years to begin with. It seems to me the long term upside is way bigger with open standards and open source software.

I don’t know whether the step to libre software will save costs. Nonetheless, I’d still argue for the government to take it, for even if it were costly, taking things for the team is part of the reason of a governments existence.

What format can I export them in?

Public money should be spent on open (source) software. File formats should be exchangeable and switching providers shouldn't be intentionally difficult.

However, what you are missing is that the UK government has its own cloud agreements called G-Cloud agreements, which are part of a larger G-Cloud Framework. [1]

Microsoft has in fact been ahead of the curve on this, having already gotten accredited to IL3 levels.[2] However, Collabora are already doing deals with the UK government, and many other firms, so if they are going to implement a cloud platform then they will need to have a good story around their own accreditation so they can be part of the UK government's Digital Marketplace.

I'm very impressed with the UK Government's attempts at breaking out of vendor lockin with their new platforms. It seems to me they've made things fairly easy, and they even host their accreditation questions for G-Cloud 6 in GitHub. [3]

1. https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/framew...

2. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/01/gcloud_rules_respect...

3. https://github.com/alphagov/supplier-submission-portal

Yet LibreOffice is said to be comparable to that version.

Sure, if you only care about quarterly costs, this is far more expensive. Luckily it seems they are not so short-sighted.

Of course it's going to be costly to switch. That's a key part of proprietary software strategy. But in the long run, the lower costs will far outweigh that initial cost. And furthermore, if many governments switch to and fund free software, it should be easy for free software to surpass proprietary software, and do so at a lower cost.

Government switching to free software has implications that go far beyond cost-savings. There are features money can't buy: proprietary software is so frequently backdoored that it's safe to assume it's all backdoored, and that security risk is huge for governments. And putting government documents in a non-proprietary file format allows accessibility, which is a key responsibility of governments serving their citizens.

The company are quoting Pentium compatible processor, 512Mb RAM and a 1024x768 screen as the minimum spec. For applications that don't need all the bells and whistles this could mean not spending money this year or next year on new machines. That could be important in the UK context.

Also, whose office suite is "better" doesn't matter. Can the software meet the task? Thats it... nobody cares if a government worker like Excel.

Exploring this stuff is automatically a cost-savings activity, because Microsoft will run around like chickens to save the business. You may end up getting significant concessions on Office just for asking the question.

Which parts of their product have you been using exactly? One can't even deselect cells in Excel, instead it will add the same cell a second time (while adding another layer of the darkening effect).

There have been other things but thankfully those haven't been stupid enough to get stuck in my head like that one.

It was not only the MS upgrade / new licensing terms & cost increases that hit some of them pretty hard, it was also the end of life for MS Windows versions (XP, servers) and that many have outsourced their IT services / departments to 3rd party providers like CapGemini, Accenture, CGI etc.

This year e.g. with the EOL of Windows 2003 server, we have heard the word "extortion" quite a few times too often with some of the agencies.

To start with, the migration of a MS Win 2003 server to e.g. MS Win 2008 R2 or 2012 can easily take 20+days.

Now multiply this with £1K p/d, plus 3rd party service uplifts, training etc.

When you look at a larger scale data-intensive agency (10k+ staff) you are talking 800-1k+ servers running MS Windows. Only a fraction of those requiring an upgrade - e.g. 70-100 - already means £Millions. The licensing cost within that are of course marginal compared to the overall TCO. What is hitting the hardest is that the 3rd party suppliers will treat the new OS versions as a "different" OS. Such migrations (MS 2003 server, like with XP to Win7) require that quite some of the legacy software running on those servers has to be upgraded / needs new service contracts / does not immediately run / has to be fully re-tested. Plus new HW of course (not included in above cost).

Similar can be said for the XP to Win7 upgrade. While there are some automation tools to test your end user application estate (larger agencies have / had 800+ "standard" applications installed) a good estimate for such a multi-year upgrade programme is in the region of £3-5M+ for 12-15k end user computers. Windows licensing costs within these figures are marginal (e.g. 5-10%) or even included within the new HW that will cost on top of this migration (est. £600 * 8-10k+ -> £6M+ computers over 3-5y). These numbers go up substantially if you are upgrading high-security environments.

These figures are for mid-size / larger UK agencies with annual IT budgets in the region of £200-300M+ - the largest UK agencies / government departments have £1B+ annual IT budgets. The situation with local government is completely different - they have to calculate with "every penny", often have only a few £M annual budgets, not having these "favourable" MS licensing terms (heard about massive increases in the last years for local governments), are already overstretched in their other budget areas - as a result of IT cost increase they will often have to cut services elsewhere. FYI, MS is much better in this arena - as for example - Oracle. There was a case documented this year when Oracle sent a UK local government a £600M annual licensing bill (increase)- Oracle, after this "shock therapy" then normally negotiates & settles for a much lower sum. Oracle claims to have an almost 80% profit margin with these kind of "licensing deals".

Hope these real-world figures help to better understand where the issues are. The main cost - IMHO - are with the way how IT is delivered & serviced (3rd party at very high cost), constant changes in licensing terms for smaller to mid-size organisations, application licensing for specific MS Win versions, end of life of core IT building blocks vs continuity and gradual upgrades. If only a fraction of these amounts go into improving (end-user) open source solutions, we will have a boost in usability & features with most of these solutions. Additionally in these cases those improvements can then be shared across all government agencies, in the UK & world-wide. In the moment each improvement or application adaptation is always charged for multiple times (within the larger gov.agency scenario often by the same 3rd party suppliers).

It would be great if someone in those government agencies would document these actual cost and Central Gov would collect this data e.g. for base-lining against e.g. Linux (there are e.g. already thousands of Linux / Unix servers running within UK government agencies).

As with the Munich example mentioned a few time in this discussion, the above numbers / ballparks would have to be used for true comparison as Munich would have had to upgrade from XP to Win7 and also face the whole server upgrade scenarios. Instead much lower MS upgrade costs have been used and most importantly - upgrades required to all the (end user) applications, forms, macros & services that would most likely also have been required within the MS Win upgrades XP -> Win7, are now being told as Linux specific cost.

It's been a decade since I've worked anywhere were anyone cared about Excel. I realize that I'm working in a "bubble" given the type of companies I tend to work with, but it does clearly illustrate that, yes, there are certainly people and companies that care about spreadsheets other than Excel.

Use Case 1: A basic spreadsheet for data manipulation, with no extensive macros or VBA involved. People use it for vlookups and other formulas they find useful.

Use Case 2: As a statistical analysis tool to crunch data.

Use Case 3: As a software platform, making extensive use of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).

So here are the issues I have with your statement that Excel "is far and away the best, fastest and most robust spreadsheet out there"...

Fallacy 1: Excel is the best technical option

Excel is not necessarily the fastest spreadsheet out there for all operations. In many cases I believe it is still very fast, and beats LibreOffice under certain document loads, but this is often not by much and in fact there is ongoing work towards locating problem documents and profiling of LibreOffice code to remove bottlenecks. In fact, in LO 4.2 many performance bottlenecks were largely solved. [1]

At this point, I do think it's largely a myth that Calc is dreadfully slow. Even if it should be found that there are performance issues, however, I know that the LO community, and in particular Collabora, have a good story around their ability to use valgrind to benchmark and analyze results. As a normal part of development work, Collabora are often provided with documents that they analyse and contribute performance improvements into the core LO code base.

There are many, many errors in even basic statistical functions in most spreadsheet applications, but Microsoft Excel is particularly egregious. However, IMO the LO devs are more thorough when it comes to this [2][3]. So for use case 2 (statistical work) then I think it's not suitable (actually, for any stats work, why not just use R?)

So if Excel is not necessarily better than Calc in terms of performance, accuracy or overall robustness (you might want to look at a feature comparison here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_Libr... - quite informative I think!) then really the issue is that it's being used as a platform for VBA development.

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Fallacy 2: Excel is the best integrated option for office application development work

So now here is the rub: this has been something causing Microsoft vendor lockin for years. Expertise in financial firms around Excel is very high, and often quite extensive custom "solutions" are based on Excel spreadsheets, but almost always via VBA.

But... Microsoft's VBA diverged from Visual Basic in VB6, and Microsoft have been struggling to know what to about it ever since. I point out that they removed support for VBA in Office 2008 for OS X, but then had to put it back in due to market demands in Office 2012, and I also note that the only update to VBA7 is to introduce actual pointers.

So basically, this will only be a competitive advantage for so long for Microsoft. As the marketplace starts to open up - and it is! - firms will be looking for solutions that either do NOT rely on Excel or VBA and that can integrate with better scripting languages, like Python.

In fact, I've been hearing that a lot of financial institutions are getting quite concerned with data silos: these are usually in Excel, haven't been audited, aren't integrated into the business' DW, are isolated and thus cause problems with transparency and decision making, and are almost NEVER documented meaning that should the maintainer leave then that spreadsheet will either be used and unmaintained, or will need to be redeveloped anyway.

So really, the key advantage Excel has is ubiquity, and really only then because of VBA, but that's a double-edged sword and eventually businesses will migrate away from it.

1. https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.2#Perform...

2. http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2013-April...

3. So far as I'm aware, Excel's RNG is now using The Mersenne Twister algorithm in Excel 2010 and beyond, but that's not officially confirmed from Microsoft. It's very hard to be certain of what is being used without such a confirmation, and given that Microsoft has form in releasing a flawed RNG update already (which they never got around to fixing for years and years!) I don't know how you could consider Excel to be "more robust" than LibreOffice.

Not challenging, I use [open|libre] a lot for writing course guides and presentations and I'm sending other people stacks of .odt/.odp stuff and they are getting interested in being able to edit the material.