The Ministry of Defence of Italy passes with MS Office to LibreOffice

2015: Implementation of LibreOffice in the Ministry of Defence of Italy

In the middle of September, 2015 it became known of plans of the Ministry of Defence of Italy to implement the cross-platform freely distributed LibreOffice office suite instead of paid Microsoft Office. The LibreItalia organization promoting in the country of LibreOffice in corporate, educational and state sectors reported about it.

Within the announced project it is going to transfer about 150 thousand workstations of the Italian Ministry of Defence to LibreOffice use. This process in which LibreItalia will take part will begin in October, 2015 and should come to the end by the end of the 2016th.

The Ministry of Defence of Italy will install LibreOffice on 150 thousand computers instead of Microsoft Office

In addition to the LibreOffice installation on computers instead of Microsoft Office, the training courses allowing to facilitate to the staff of the ministry migration on new software products will be organized. The training online programs will be created and published under one of licenses of the Creative Commons family.

Thanks to LibreOffice implementation the Ministry of Defence of Italy will make the ODF format (Open Document Format) the official standard for all documents issued by department.

LibreItalia notes that this project is the first when freely distributed software is implemented at the level of the ministry in Italy. Before transition to Open Source was performed by separate regional administrations. It is possible that other state bodies in the country will pass to LibreOffice and the ODF standard.

Though many authorities in the world prefer to use Microsoft Office, more and more state agencies pass to open products, like LibreOffice. Earlier this office suite was installed on 240 thousand computers by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of France and also the French police which transferred about 72 thousand PCs to LibreOffice.^[1]

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