The Italian municipality of Modena is well on its way to become independent from major Information Technology (IT) vendors regarding its office productivity tools as was reported at the end of August 2010 by Laura Seidenari, instructor at the City's IT department.

The City Council of Modena started replacing the proprietary office tools in January 2008 and has already installed Open Office at about 1 500 of its 1 600 workstations. Ms. Seidenari says "this has helped save the city some €250 000 on licences for proprietary software".

The city administration has also installed on the desktops of the workstations in question other open source tools, including the mail client 'Thunderbird', the photo editing tool 'Gimp' and the file transfer tool 'Filezilla'.

However, the transition to vendor independence is not yet complete. The city continues to be tied to the proprietary office tools, since many of the city's spreadsheet calculations depend on proprietary macros. As a result, the council is forced to continue to pay for proprietary software licences for many of its workstations, and the IT department is burdened with the extra maintenance. To remedy the situation, explains Seidenari, "the IT administrators are studying how to replace these macros".

According to the IT instructor, "most city officials find the open source suite easy to use". "Creating new documents is not a problem. The biggest issue is converting documents created by the proprietary tools" she added.

Users initially resisted switching to Open Office, prompting the city council to increase user-training and support. "This has helped to change the attitudes. Open Office is now accepted by most of the civil administrators" reports Seidenari.

Modena's city council decided to increase its use of open source tools in 2004. It still continues to support the move, says Seidenari, as it has helped save on proprietary licences and has helped make citizens and enterprises in Modena become aware of open source. She adds: "We are also contacted by other municipalities in the region that use Open Office, or that are interested to switch."

Modena is not considering replacing its proprietary operating system. However, there are a number of desktops in the IT department that are running Linux, concludes the instructor. Modena is also running Linux in a local youth training institute and collaborates with the University of Modena to create awareness on open source.

Further Information:

• Original news article - OSOR.EU
• Related news article by the City of Modena - Free software in the Municipality of Modena (in Italian)
• Related OSOR.EU article - IT: City of Modena switches to OpenOffice