An Empirical Study on the Migration to OpenOffice.org in a Public Administration

Abstract

The aim of the article is to report the results of a migration to Open Source Software (OSS) in one public administration. The migration focuses on the office automation field and, in particular, on the OpenOffice.org suite. We have analysed the transition to OSS considering qualitative and quantitative data collected with the aid of different tools. All the data have been always considered from the point of view of the different stakeholders involved, IT managers, IT technicians, and users. The results of the project have been largely satisfactory. However the results cannot be generalised due to some constraints, like the environment considered and the parallel use of the old solution. Nevertheless, we think that the data collected can be of valuable aid to managers wishing to evaluate a possible transition to OSS.