Italy's Ministry of Defense will drop Microsoft Office

May 11, 2016 10:00 GMT  ·  By

Following on last year's bold announcement that they will attempt to migrate from proprietary Microsoft Office products to an open-source alternative like LibreOffice, Italy's Ministry of Defense now expects to save up to 29 million Euro with this move.

We said it before, and we'll say it again, this is the smartest choice a government institution can do. And to back up this statement, the Italian Ministry of Defense announced that they expect to save between 26 and 29 million Euro over the next few years by migrating to the LibreOffice open-source software for productivity and adopting the Open Document Format (ODF).

"Taking into account the deadlines set by our current Microsoft Office licenses, we will have 75,000 (70%) LibreOffice users by 2017, and an additional 25,000 by 2020," said General Camillo Sileo, Deputy Chief of Department VI, Systems Department C4I, for the Transformation of Defence and General Staff, for ISA (Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations).

5,000 workstations have been migrated until now

In the initial report, they said that the entire transition process from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice is expected to be completed by the end of the year 2016, and now the Italian Ministry of Defense brags about the fact that they've successfully migrated a total of 5,000 workstations, and they're now working with LibreItalia on an e-learning course to teach the military staff how to use the LibreOffice office suite.

"We started with an impact assessment, a series of briefings to the staff, and the training of trainers, installers, and IT representatives. We are now working on a LibreOffice e-learning course for our users, which will be made available under a copyleft license," says General Camillo Sileo. "Thus far, we have migrated 5,000 workstations and have not yet encountered any serious problems."

The entire migration is run under the LibreDifesa project, which follows the LibreOffice Migration Protocol published by The Document Foundation, and similar movements already made by governments of other European countries, including Germany, Holland, United Kingdom, Spain, and France. With this move, Italy's Ministry of Defense hopes to be a valuable example to other public agencies.