On 24 February 2012, the Italian province of Savona unveiled its new website, rebuilt on the open source content management system Drupal. The province argues that using free and open source software helps reduce operating costs and at the same time gives the freedom to customise and share the province's applications.

In a statement announcing the unveiling of the new website, the province states that it has already been implementing this type of software for many of its administrative tasks. Savona, one of Italy's 109 provinces, uses, for instance, this type of software to offer online access to its database of geographic information. "The web-platform offering navigation services is completely built with open source", the province also says.

The province had announced, back in 2007 its move to an open source office suite. An Italian open source IT services provider had assisted in the move to OpenOffice, listing the 350 desktops in the province among its many references.

The use of OpenOffice by the province was also the topic of a presentation in July 2010, at a workshop organised at the Tuscany Open Source Software Laboratory, a joint-research lab from the Tuscany region's Competence Centre for Open Source, the Province of Pisa, the University of Pisa, and the Navacchio IT incubator centre.

The province and the company both were involved with the development in 2011 of Oxsit, an open source extension to OpenOffice to offer electronic digital signing of documents, based on the XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (Xades) XML extensions. Oxsit was developed with the support from the municipalities of Trento, Rovereto and Bologna, the provinces of Bologna and Savona and the Galliera Hospital in Genoa. Oxsit is made available under two open source licences, the GPLv3 and the EUPL and is available on the Joinup software development forge.

Further Information:

• Original news article - Joinup website
• Tuscany Open Source Software Laboratory
• OOoXAdESSignIT
• XML Advanced Electronic Signatures
• EUPL License
• GPLv3 License