Short Bytes: As a result of last year’s announcement that Italian Ministry of Defence will ditch Microsoft’s Office suite and adopt open source LibreOffice, a saving of up to 29 million is expected over the next few years. This migration is done under a project dubbed LibreDifesa that has brought LibreOffice to about 5,000 workstations.
Back in September 2015, Italian Ministry of Defense entered into an agreement with the Italy-based non-profit LibreItalia, an organization created to spread LibreOffice in different parts of the society, including education, government, and civil society.
Now, the Italian ministry has announced that they are expecting to save up to 29 million Euro with this move favoring open source. This financial effect will be seen over the few upcoming years.
Also read: Why It’s The Best Time To Learn Linux And Open Source Programming
After their current Microsoft Office licenses will expire, the Ministry of Defense expects to have 75,000 LibreOffice installations by 2017, which is 70% of the total users. By the year 2020, this number is expected to increase by an additional 25,000.
Till now, 5,000 systems migrated from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice
Under this migration project dubbed LibreDifesa, so far, about 5,000 workstations have been migrated to LibreOffice.
LibreItalia is also working on an e-learning course that will teach the Italian military staff regarding the usage of LibreOffice suites.
According to General Camillo Sileo, this project started as an impact assessment that included briefings to the staff, training the trainers, and IT representatives. He adds that people are enthusiastic and helpful regarding this migration.
In another recent mass-migration to open source software, the Italian city Vicenza announced that it’s planning to replace Microsoft Windows OS by a Linux distro Zorin OS.
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