Daily Archives: Saturday, June 4, 2016

  • Italian Defence Ministry on LibreOffice migration

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

    Italo Vignoli has written today about the Italian Defence Ministry’s migration (posts passim) from the proprietary MS Office suite to a free and open source alternative, LibreOffice.

    LibreOffice logo

    On 30th May, General Sileo of the Italian Defence Ministry gave a presentation on migrating to LibreOffice at Milan University within the scope of meetings organised by the university’s centre for innovation and organisational change in the public sector (Icona Centre), with this particular event being organised by the Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods for the public management degree course.

    General Sileo explained how the adoption of the migration procedure enabled the project to be implemented on the basis of Italian and international best practice, combining the best experience of the community – such as LibreUmbria – and making all elements common factors to avoid surprises, problems and rejection during the migration.

    At the end of the migration, which involves some 150, workstations, the Italian Defence Ministry will have saved €26-29mn., which will then be available for use on “strategic” activities.

  • Introducing The Document Liberation Project

    Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

    Document Liberation Project logoToday many people have digital content they created years ago and stored in obsolete and proprietary document formats. Very often these old file formats cannot be opened by any application on the user’s current operating system, leaving the users locked out of their own content.

    However, it is not just individuals that are affected: public and private sector organisations are similarly afflicted; and this can have huge consequences when, say, a a government is unable to read or access digital data it has created in the past.

    This is where The Document Liberation Project comes into its own.

    The Document Liberation Project was created to enable, people, private and public sector organisations to recover their data from proprietary formats and to provide a means of converting the recovered data into open and standardised file formats, such as Open Document Format, thus returning effective control over the content to the actual authors from the software computer that devised the proprietary formats.

    To achieve this, The Document Liberation Project develops software libraries that applications can use to read data in proprietary formats.

    The following video explains how this process works.

    Read more about The Document Liberation Project and the list of projects it supports.