Lars D. Noodén wrote:
Here is a very unofficial translation of the CS article.
One comment is that the quote, "Therefore a swap should not be
difficult" should be qualified. A swap, or even a phased rollout,
might not be difficult right now -- until MS or its reseller ensure
that the police's infrastructure is thoroughly marinated in MS Office
macros. This would be significantly less work and less legal risk
than MS took to spread parts of MSIE throughout windows in response to
the mid 1990's antritrust trials.
For electronic records, the are strict rules in Sweden about the
readability and potential for long term preservation. OpenDocument
meets those and using OOo would reduce the amount of work that has to
be done to convert public records before turning them over to the
National Archives.
Since OOo runs on legacy systemsand Koffice does not, OOo can be
phased in
more easily. A very big selling point, if framed correctly, would be
OpenDocument support.
State agencies, that haven't yet been privatized, are under very
strong laws (actually the constitution) to keep public materials
available, until the British/French-style EU constitution takes
precidence:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/div/offentlighet.html
By posting to the marketing list, I have guaranteed that MS will
increase its activities against the police. ;)
-Lars
http://computersweden.idg.se/ArticlePages/200602/13/20060213165505_CS270/20060213165505_CS270.dbp.asp
The Swedish police examine open programs
The Swedish police are going much further in their effort to find
inexpensive systems. Open source stands high on the list. At the
same time the French police are tossing out both Microsoft's Office
suite and exchanging MS Internet Explorer for Firefox.
The Directorate of the Royal Police has started an investigation of
open alternatives to Oracle and Bea's Weblogic. The database and
applications layers in the police's IT archtecture are in the focus.
During the autumn the focus will be raised to the presentation layer.
There Microsoft's solutions, including the Office package and MS
Internet explorer, have a poor standing.
- Open source products are today sufficiently good to be able to
compare with the leading providers, says Per-Ola Sjöswärd, IT
strategist for the Royal Police.
- Today we have Office 97. By the autumn we must take a position on
an upgrade to the next version. That's a matter of millions. I would
bet on Open Office, but of course it shall be thoroughly evaluated
before we make a decision, he says.
France, The land of progress
In France the police force has already begun to swap out Microsoft's
Office for OpenOffice, an open source project. 70 000 users are
involved. The police estimate the savings to be nearly 18.5 million
SEK - per year. By the end of the year MS Internet Explorer shall be
gone completely. The replacement is Firefox.
The French Police's head of IT, Christian Brachet, says to AFP that
Firefox is to be recommended because it is based on the W3C's
international standards and functions just as well on Windows, Mac OS,
and Linux. Fire fox is widely accepted to be much more secure and
reliable.
- One should of course choose the web browser that follows W3C
standards. MS Explorer has extensions in the form of Active-X
components which often mean severe security risks. Ourselves, we
don't quite have the same risk scenario because we are have a
completely internal network, disconnected from the Internet, says
Per-Ola Sjöswärd.
The police investigated the OpenOffice variant, StarOffice, two years
ago. At that point only one out of 160 users had any problem leaving
Microsoft's solution due to macros. Of the Office package, the police
man on the street uses only Word and even then no functions beyond
spelling correction and formatting. Therefore a swap should not be
difficult.
A better format
An additional advantage of Open Office is that is saves in an open
document format which, among others, the National Archives of Sweden
is interested in for long term electronic archives.
CS described last December the police department's new database.
MySQL will be investigated during the spring as an alternative to
Oracle and Jboss as an alternative to Weblogic for application servers.
Lars Nooden ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog ...
... until you start barking.
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Lars-
You and others on the list might be interested in my piece today about
languages.
http://www.PlexNex.com
-Sam
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