The administration of the city of Munich has now replaced all of the macros that tied it to a proprietary office suite, the city reported on 23 February 2012.

"The final macro that could not be automatically converted is now rewritten and placed on a server that hosts all macros and macro-related applications. Here they are centrally managed and here the quality of the macro's can be assured," explains Kirsten Böge, the communication manager for LiMux, the project for the city's migration to vendor independent IT.

She adds that the three best macros will be made available online on both the 'Freies Office Deutschland' and the Wollmux websites.

The city's civil administrators had over time created more than twenty thousand macros, templates and forms, all of them written for a proprietary office suite. Many were created without proper documentation, further locking in the administration to this proprietary software vendor.  

When the city decided to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in in 2003, getting rid of the macro's, templates and forms was seen as one of the biggest stumbling blocks. "An initial survey found seven thousand such macros, templates and forms. During the migration IT administrators would stumble on previously unknown others, which had been created mostly without a long-term strategy."

The majority of the total 14 000 PCs used in the offices of Munich now use the open source office suite OpenOffice (version 3.2.1). The default document format in the city is the Open Document Format (ODF).

During the migration the IT department also managed to reduce the number of predefined documents and forms by 40 percent, Böge writes, adding that the in February 2012 the city had 9 810 workstations running on Linux.

Replacing the proprietary office suite by an open source alternative also provided the city with a "unique opportunity to remove macro redundancies and to create more efficient alternatives". Böge says that the current system for creating letterheads for official documents reduced the number of macros by 20 percent. "Munich is keen to share this knowledge and experience with other municipalities and administrations."

Further information:

• Original news article - Joinup
• Blog post by Munich's IT department (in German)
• Related news article - Pro-Linux (in German)
• Freies Office Deutschland (in German)
• Wollmux (in German)