City of Helsinki Wants To Keep Software Costs Secret | Hacker News Reader

City of Helsinki Wants To Keep Software Costs Secret

fsfe.org

60 pointsMRonney24 comments

A bit off-topic, but I really don't think that LibreOffice is a good alternative for MS Office. Every single time I try to do something in LibreOffice I find out that it's missing some incredibly basic feature that I need. Last time it was rotating images in Writer: I had to edit the image in another app.

MS products get a lot of hate but I think that Office (at least the newest verions) really has nailed it. Shame it's not on Linux.

Agreed. I tried using the Libre suite for a while to save on costs, but the time I spent grappling with Libre was worth much more to me than the $120 cost of Office.

You can rightfully accuse Office of feature creep, but I'd still rather use it over any of its competitors.

That might also be where they came up with the 21 million euro number. Having every single office employee take days of training to learn how to sidestep all the quirks in LibreOffice is expensive.

So is having to retrain them on the Office Ribbon, or on Win8. the nice thing about FOSS is that you update when you want to - not when Redmond decide you going to.

Also the majority of users only use the basic functionality. If you have 10,000 users in your organisation all creating new document templates, editing embedded images or creating pivot tables - it's likely that you have more problems than simply the Office suite

The number of organizations using outdated versions of Office and Windows seems to indicate that FOSS does not somehow makes you more free to not upgrade.

I really don't understand the lack of rotate. They have solarize, charcoal and other effects but not something that basic. The issue is over a decade old https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=3545

As a contrast, I've pretty much lived in LibreOffice (and a little Google Docs) for the past ~2 years for personal stuff and haven't found much I miss from MS Office. My needs for an office suite are pretty basic though, I suppose.

Same here. We have been MS-Office free for more than three years and have LibreOffice on all our laptops (Linux for me, my wife's Windows and my son's Mac). Until a few years ago, when documents created/saved in (then) OpenOffice were sent to others, they occasionally used to have problems opening them in MS Office. I can't remember the last time we had heard such complaints.

My my complaint with LibreOffice is that it's slow to start up and eats up quite a lot of memory, especially when left running for a long time.

Everybody in the Finnish software business knows that much of the public procurement happens over various "old boys club" arrangements, and "surprisingly" usually ends in the hands of the same two or three big IT providers.

Finland used to be regarded as one of the least corrupted countries, but that has crumbled as more and more of these situations surface.

No wonder they want to keep their costs secret.

Please don't spread those kind of rumors as they are not true. Public procurement happens through an open process in which I have been also participating. Everybody involved can get their competitors RFQ replies and get the verdict with comments for each RFQ section.

True, most big acquirements go for two or three big IT providers, but let's face it - how many big IT companies Finland can hold which have the men power available to provide big systems and long term support? And for the record, I do not work for any of those three.

The official reply for requesting the details of the Open Office report was denied due to the fact that city of Helsinki has made a deal with Gartner Ireland Ltd which denies them giving out the figures for two years. Perhaps a bad contract, but hopefully they'll learn from it.

I admit, I probably used a bit stronger words than warranted, but this is entirely due to the frustration on the constant state of public IT procurement failure in the country.

Anyway, I'm quite well aware how the RFQ process works. The problem is that even though the idea works well, it is still very easy to write your requirements so that your preferred vendor gets the deal.

This is sort of in line with the classic Stalin quote: I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.

Also, I find it curious that the city is even allowed to get into deals that deny them public accountability.

This might be a great strategy for a politician: if you screw up, lock the details behind a similar deal, only to be opened after the next elections.

The migration from MS Office to LibreOffice is not straightforward, especially if you have millions of documents. In my experience, any complex document will almost always fail to render correctly ...

I don't think public sector and enterprises should try to find alternative software for Microsoft Office. Instead, they should move everything to browser and kill software by implementing great document/content management systems support that.

They say that their 21000 pc pilot project with LibreOffice shows that using LibreOffice over their proprietary office tools increases the cost by 70%. This seems very difficult to believe without proper arguments.

One way I can think of that is not surprising would be they dumped LibreOffice on users with no training. That generated a huge uptick in support calls and therefore costs.

A lot of migration projects seem set up to fail, the quickest way to do that is make the users unhappy and site increased support costs.

It's not hard to see how the numbers could start adding up. If it costs 21M Euros for a 21K PC pilot project, that's 1000 Euros per PC which sounds a bit low. Consider:

* How many users do they have, what's their sophistication level, and what kind of retraining will be required to use a new software product?

* How will incompatibilities be handled with their existing documents? Is LibreOffice absolutely 100% feature complete identical to Microsoft Office? If not, what proportion of documents use incompatible features? How much effort is required to determine this incompatibility? How much effort is required to redo these documents to fix the incompatibility? How many employees are required to be on such a conversion team and how long will the conversion take? Can the conversion even be done?

* How is interaction done with external users who send Office documents? What happens when users outside their office send them Office documents which make use of incompatible features? Will this require maintaining an ongoing conversion team? What is the opportunity cost inherent in the delays in getting documents converted?

* How is installation of LibreOffice done? Can it be setup on a centralized WSUS server and automatically deployed to every user as Microsoft Office can, or does it require an army of people manually installing it on thousands of PCs? How are updates for both version upgrades and security patches handled? What is the typical update schedule for LibreOffice (security-related patches, compatibility upgrades, etc.) and will this need to be done manually as well? How many man-hours per year will this take?

* LibreOffice doesn't include an email product. What alternate solution would they use? What is the cost to convert all Outlook email and archives to this new solution? Can the new solution make use of all calendaring and other Exchange-related features that Outlook has? Can the new solution be deployed on WSUS and kept up to date automatically, or does this too require an army of people manually installing and doing updates? Can they maintain the security permissions they currently use, such as restricting the ability for users to forward internal communications outside the office?

* LibreOffice doesn't have a Visio, Project, or OneNote replacements. What are they going to use for these? How do they convert existing documents and interact with external users who send them Office documents? Is it even possible?

And so on and so forth. Free is seldom free, and LibreOffice isn't a replacement for the full suite of Office functionality. People like to bash Microsoft because it's what all the cool kids are doing, but once you factor in the amount of time involved in all the above Microsoft Office is the cheapest solution around.

The fact is that LibreOffice is just not that great. Sorry.

Does your city council's housing dept really need any WP functionality that wasn't in Wordpad or Windows 3.1 Write?

You know, it probably does. When they produce reports, they need to be able to do things like footnotes, tables of contents, indices; incorporate maps and graphics, and scale or otherwise make them print-ready; use a variety of different layouts and templates to make information accessible to the public; expand or modify historical reports and datasheets (ie, load files that were produced at least within the last 10 years, if not 20); and possibly produce these documents in a variety of different languages and/or formats.

In terms of single documents used for correspondence, they likely need things like mail merge, change tracking, multiple authorship (housing departments deal with a lot of legal issues, from evictions to liability to real estate transfer) and so on.

You're falling into a classic developer trap of not being interested in other people's jobs, and thus assuming that the jobs don't need uch int he way of technology. It's the same mindset that leads people to suggest using emacs for everything -because that's what the developer uses all day; or doing everything at a shell prompt - despite the obvious market preference for GUIs; or that everybody should learn to code - though most people clearly prefer not to. One might as well suggest that developers should just stop piddling about with software and learn to build their own hardware instead of pursuing the massively wasteful path of general-purpose computing.

Not a developer - I'm a project manager in a high tech industry.

A lot of my time is dealing with reports and projects where somebody decided that they didn't quite like how a title of a table was formatted and so made their own "fixes" which looked ok on their machine. Or they couldn't understand some remote object linking functionality so they converted the spreadsheet into an image and embedded that.

I suspect a lot of companies, and certainly most goverment offices, would be more efficient if the people who write pretty much standard letters to customers/claimants didn't have the same MS-office install as somebody editing 10,000 page technical reports for an Airbus A380.

You can (or at least we used to) customize the menus/toolbars for Word to make a simplified version for secretaries that were really happier with typewriters.

Yup, I daily have to deal with Office documents that have 'pointless' formatting. A good set of templates with formatting protected could save so much time. That goes for Open/Libre Office as much as MS Office.

LibreOffice has mathematical formula editing that I find much more congenial than that currently provided in MS Office 2010. (Yes I know LaTex but I'm talking casual use of simple formulas here).

I can see Outlook and exchange alone representing major hurdles and expenses that could cause this.

If you already own office then the cost of getting new calandering and email software up and running for a large group and then training them on how to use it is non trivial.

It's not difficult to see how LibreOffice costs more than Microsoft office.

Lets imagine that the average city worker gets paid $60,000 per year and works 1500 hours per year, (35 hour work week, 4 weeks paid vacation) or $40 per hour.

A copy of Office on newegg costs $349 which is pretty much the highest price anyone will ever pay for MS Office. A city probably pays closer to $50 to $100.

Lets imagine a day of training for LibreOffice, and a day of downtime over a year due to incompatibilities (lets assume that there are no bugs in Libre Office and the incompatibilities are purely due to MS's monopolistic practices), 14 hours times $40 is $560 and we haven't even paid for the instructor for the training or the IT guy to fix the problems.

Perhaps if you assume that the person is already proficient in Microsoft Office, that might be true. But if you've ever watched someone go through the MS Office 2003 ==> 2007/2010 transition ("You do not like the ribbon? You must bear the ribbon!") it is not a productive sight either. They're still using Office 2003 on Windows XP at my wife's job.

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