Scottish Police Revert to Microsoft Office 699
LordGuha writes "The Central Scotland Policy is removing StarOffice and replacing it with Microsoft Office citing lower maintenance and running costs and greater integration with other departments. According to the article StarOffice was implemented in 2000 when the department was low in cash but lately have estimated that the Microsoft software would cost no more and lead to greater efficiencies."
old StarOffice vs new (Score:4, Informative)
Corrections (Score:5, Informative)
Secondly, they are migrating nearly *everything* back to MS. TheRegister have a better description here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/08/11/ms_lochs_
complete with anglo-saxon mispronunciation joke
It's a shame, but maybe they are right. It's not easy to pay enough for good linux/unix admins on public sector wages.
Just part of the Scottish Police Force (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2+2.... (Score:2, Informative)
I don't think Star Office is free. I think you're confusing it with Open Office.
Re:2+2.... (Score:2, Informative)
b) Large organisations don't pay list price. This is software, Microsoft will have discounted it down to a point where they can regain the business.
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:1, Informative)
FYI, your post is just as useless as the previous one.
Did anyone read TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:2+2.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Corrections (Score:2, Informative)
I am a Linux/Unix admin professionaly and I recently went from OpenOffice back to MS-Office.
The cost of "free" software is too damn high when you cant share documents properly. My CV kept causing everyone elses Word to crash, thats a cost I couldn't afford to pay as a jobseeker.
Still? (Score:5, Informative)
You know, I used to be the standard-bearer for that argument, but as of OO 1.9x, interoperability with MS is getting pretty damned good. Particularly the word processor.
Anyone having trouble with it still is usually using Linux and hasn't gotten their true-type fonts working correctly.
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:2, Informative)
How was copper wire invented? (Score:2, Informative)
A: Two Scotsmen fighting over a penny...
Well, I'm all Scottish and I just wanted to point out that, as a race, we have the proportionately highest incidence of philanthropy of any nation on the planet*. Look at folk like Carnegie. Don't get me started on inventions, for which we are also, as a race, reknowned...
John (haggis eating**, kilt wearing***, bagpipe loving**** Scotsman)
* Source: John's International Survey of Racial Philanthropy, August 2005;
** McSween's;
*** Only at Weddings or when abroad;
**** I lied about loving bagpipes. They are no less than weapons of mass distruction disguised as musical instruments...
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:2, Informative)
Re:2+2.... (Score:3, Informative)
Of course this is not a problem with OpenOffice per se, it's a problem of imperfect interoperability between OpenOffice and Word, i.e. the Word loader in OO is imperfect. But this shouldn't be a problem if all your documents are in OpenOffice format, and all your users use it - provided you don't need to exchange many documents with other organisations using Word. I have many large and complex documents created in OpenOffice (which is far nicer to use than Word), and because I have no need to ever load them in Word at all (they get distributed as PDF), the solution works well.
I've started playing around with the OpenOffice 2 beta and it's support for loading Word files has definitely improved (as has it's PDF export). Some of my older .doc files that I previously could not open in OO 1 I can now open perfectly. I hope it's good enough though to start being compelling enough to attract "converts". Converting to open formats costs money in the short term, of course, and will be a "painful" process for the world to go through, but the whole idea is that you save money in the long term, and ultimately it's necessary to move away from proprietary formats, because it's needlessly inefficient.
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:3, Informative)
No, StarOffice is not open source software. You're thinking of OpenOffice. Sun still sells StarOffice as a proprietary office suite.
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:2, Informative)
No. Some of the code is open, some is closed and the license is commercial. The OS version is OpenOffice which would have saved them 25 pounds a seat right off the top, at the cost of some of the propriatary code and Sun's support.
Other than that your point stands.
KFG
Re:Where is the OSS answer to Exchange?? (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe here? [open-xchange.org] I personnaly perfer Novell's (SuSE's) OpenExchange, easier to set up and install. Been using it at the office for over 2 years now.
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html [apachefriends.org]
Where is the OSS answer to Exchange??
http://www.scalix.com/ [scalix.com]
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:3, Informative)
That's not 100% correct. From TFA:
The agency said in 2000 that it would see initial savings of at least £245,000 (US$439,000) from switching to StarOffice and Linux, and that the open-source deployment would allow it to bring productivity software to more of its officers.
The article also states:
In the past, when the agency deployed a new police application on StarOffice and Linux, the application had to be customized to work with the open-source software, Stirling said. It was also more difficult to configure the open-source software so that police officers could access their files from any police station, he said.
Despite the focus on StarOffice, that last sentence obviously refers to the Linux Desktop, most likely in relation to its SMB and NT Domain support.
Here's how my police use it (Score:2, Informative)
Well, I work IT in a law enforcement agency, and so I can speak to that. The parent is right, you don't know what the Hell you're talking about.
Police use Word to fill in reports, forms, etc. that could definitely not be formatted using Wordpad. They also have to save that form data, which could not be done with a web form or Acrobat Reader.
They also use Word to interact with Excel and Access databases. When you're sending out a notification letter to 180 victims in a given county, you better believe it's a helluva lot easier to use Word's mail merge than typing each name individually in Wordpad.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Trust me, the police not only use Word, but a whole bunch of other software as well. And you should be glad they do.
-Eric
Re:HA!!! (Score:4, Informative)
It was not a migration at all! (Score:4, Informative)
Even more astonoshing is the fact that Microsoft apparantly promised to help develop an application that according to the Scottish would cost £100.00!
They only paid £60.000 for the licenses so i would say they got a VERY sweat deal on this. Can you get any cheaper than to get paid to use a product?
Read this article for some facts:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/08/11/HNscott
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:4, Informative)
More likely the problem was they couldn't "access" their star office based paperwork from *any* police station because the other 95% of police stations PCs would have office and windows which can't open staroffice files.
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:5, Informative)
There's really not enough information in the fine article to draw a lot of the conclusions being put forth.
In our shop there are, largely speaking, two sides to IT: the mainframe (now super mini) side that contained all the criminal information, and the micro side, used mainly for administrative support. The mobile data terminals and the computers used by most of the sworn population connected to the mainframe. They used pre-designed screens for storing and retrieving information. The support staff used various Office products to provide various services, up to and including reports summarizing criminal data.
But keep in mind that we were a gov't agency. We had to have file interop with the rest of the City, and County, and State, and Feds. We had more severe budget restrictions than most private sector had to deal with. Try not having a pool of money for training for the future year, it isn't fun. When I needed training for a new product, I had to wait for my department head to be out of town and the bureau manager asked me how a project was going. I told him I needed training, he got funds taken out of equipment maintenance to send me to Atlanta for a week. This is not a slush fund, this was money to be used for maintaining the mainframe, fortunately there was some unused funds.
As a rule, if money isn't allocated, it isn't spent. And that is a hard and fast rule.
For the criminal side, they had standards that were dictated by the FBI and the National Criminal Information System. Everything has to be coded in specific ways. Trust me, you DO NOT want to see the information schema! It is not correctly normalized and nothing can be done about it because THEY DON'T CONTROL IT. They had to work around those problems as best they could.
The basic problem is that you don't have a dozen Java programmers and a dozen C++ programmers sitting around just waiting to solve every little problem. We had three network administrators supporting 15+ sites. We had five developers (on the administrative side) for a total micro staff of maybe 15 or so when I left supporting over 2000 officers and another 1800 or so civilian, not including physical networking support (cabling, PC installation and hardware support).
Saying "all you need is a web applet to do X, Y, Z" is disingenuous. It will never be that simple. Until you've lived in police IT for more than 5 years, you won't have a clue what their overall requirements are and you're making assumptions that don't translate. Their data must ultimately fit legally-mandated forms. That's taken care of by tight data restrictions on the criminal side. On the administrative side, by using Office, you have a mobile work force of people who can move back and forth between various other City departments, assuming they can pass the background investigation.
You're talking an insanely complex system and set of requirements that have grown out of old technology over decades and decades of modification.
Yes, it's a MS shop. Started with 3Com 3+Share file servers, went to Lan Manager, now NT Server. Desktops went from Dos to Windows to Win2K and now probably XP. Apps went from Word, Multiplan, DataFlex to Office and SQL Server. There are non-MS technologies both in the server room and on the desktop, but the only place you'll see *nix is on specific apps, such as the Automated Fingerprint Identification System which started out on an RS/6000, I have no idea what it's on, it was not in my realm.
I like *nix, huge pluses over MS servers. But OO/SO just isn't there. The IT requirements for interoperability with so many other departments both in the City and at other layers of gov't are too vast to take a critical area and make it less than 100% compatible with the rest of the infrastructure is bad. I make no claim to have a clue how Scotl
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Only 5% of users were using StarOffice (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Star Office Problems. (Score:3, Informative)
There are still some major problems for MS Office.
First, it normally defaultly saves in The most current Office Format not something backwards compatible with old copies of Word, yes this is an easy change but people when they are done just hit the save Icon and they are done, they don't want to go through tens of choices and find the document that everyone else uses.
Second, Individuals have invested time in older versions of MS Office. From those High School Computer Class to College Classes, CS101. The education system for computers are so dumb that they teach people how to use a specific version of Microsoft Word but not a Word Processor. So almost everyone who enters the Work field know an out of date Office.
Third, Speed. Office has had a speed problem from the day they invented Clippy. Putting animated characters over the work are slow things down where the users feel it is important, boot up and typing and saving.
Fourth, Interface. MS Office is setup with a good interface Windows, but not for Linux or Mac. Running MS Office under Wine makes it feel completely out of place because it is not using a native toolkit.
Fifth, Work Flow. MS Office's goal is to create all the functionality needed by office workers but it forgot to get the work flow. Watch a non technical person use Office and you will see that their ways of solving problems may surprise you. They avoid using Style Sheets and just go for the Font Drop Down, except for hitting tab they will use the space and they never ever use hot keys for anything. The menus are off limit to them (The same with the windows start button) If they don't see it it must be an advanced feature that they shouldn't use.
MS Office is good for MCSEs but not for normal people.
Re:Here's how my police use it (Score:3, Informative)
Personally, if I needed to have people print stuff at their desks from a web environment,I would find a pdf library for php and use that to create formatted documents. Coding such a solution would be a cakewalk for any half-respectable webmonkey.