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Overview: Initial Results of a Large-Scale Migration Project ~ by Carlo Daffara |
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Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 01:30 PM EDT
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Carlo Daffara sent me a fascinating email about the European COSPA project, that is doing a controlled study of migrations to Free and Open Source software by European governmental administrations. They are measuring and facilitating migrations in a two-step strategy, initially to OpenOffice.org and later to GNU/Linux on the desktops. They already have thousands of desktops migrated, with thousands more planned. The data on switching to OpenOffice.org is very encouraging.
What have they found so far? What makes the transition work well? Are there steps one can take to improve user acceptance and ease transitional issues? He told me some of what they found, and I asked him if he'd be willing to elaborate on the findings for Groklaw, and he graciously agreed. Official results of the study will be available later. This is a sneak peek, from his point of view, of what they have learned so far, plus some personal observations and tips to reduce migration shock. If you are considering a large-scale migration to either OpenOffice.org or all the way to a GNU/Linux desktop, I think you'll find the data illuminating and his realistic and practical suggestions valuable in making it a smoother experience. They found that a number of simple steps encourage user acceptance. For example, just changing the default application for .doc, .xls, and .ppt to OpenOffice.org resulted in significantly faster user acceptance of OOo.org, even when Microsoft Office was simultaneously available. Interestingly, the study was in OOo 1.1.x, not in the just-released and improved 2.0, yet acceptance and voluntary switching to OpenOffice.org was a marked finding.
He explains how to solve font issues, how to make use of hardware too old for XP by making the switch to GNU/Linux, offers links to tools and notes four significant technologies he's found useful in easing the stress of a large-scale migration.
They also have developed some training materials for OOo in flash and sxi format that is available under a Creative Commons license.
Since 1999, Carlo Daffara has been the Italian representative to the European Working Group on Libre Software, the first IST-supported working group to deal with Open Source and Free/Libre Software. The group was created at the initiative of the Information Society Directorate General to analyze FOSS, create a set of recommendations, and write a paper to be presented to the Commission.
He coedited with Jesus Gonzale Barahona the resulting white paper [PDF], presented at IST99 in Helsinki. Since 2000, he has been a member of the Internet Society (ISOC) working group on public software as part of the group committee, and contributed to the Open Source part of the article presented by ISOC to UNESCO on global trends for universal access to information resources. Currently Mr. Daffara is head of research of Conecta, an Open Source consulting company.
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An Overview of Initial Results of a Large-Scale Migration Project
by Carlo Daffara
I appreciate PJ giving me the opportunity to present some initial, preliminary results
of an European research project called COSPA, Consortium for Open Source in
the Public Administration, that is performing a controlled study on the
adoption of Free/Libre Open Source software (FLOSS) and open data standards
on the desktops of several European public administrations. The focus is as
much on the software as it is on the data standards; and the project
includes an analysis step of available standards, of FLOSS tools, and on the
development of methodologies for performing an efficient migration. A
complete TCO model will also be available soon (at
http://www.cospa-project.org).
We have the luck of having quite a large number of different
administrations, from a high-specialization Irish hospital to provinces and
municipalities from all over Europe, and a large number of external
observers. The migration steps are actually two: the first one from
proprietary office suites to OpenOffice.org, and the second one is from
proprietary operating systems to GNU/Linux. We already have performed a few
thousands migrations to OOo (which is ongoing), and just started the
Linux one; evaluation of acceptance and productivity has been done using
surveys, questionnaires and automated tools that (with the express consent
of the user) register some activity statistics in an anonymous way.
Now, the obligatory disclaimer: the opinions expressed here are not those of
the European Commission, and the results are preliminary and based on an
initial sample; we hope to be able within the end of the year to publish
some official deliverables with more consolidated results.
What we have found up to now:
The number of different processes (or workflows) within public
administrations is extremely high, and practically all of them require an
ICT tool in at least one step. Not considering custom software, the most
important desktop tools used are in this order: word processing tools,
spreadsheets, and relational databases. (For this reason, the consortium has
also developed a set of porting tools from proprietary databases to open ones
like PostGreSQL. You can check
here for the COSPA-developed
Oracle-to-Postgres migration tool, that rewrites the PL/SQL and implements
many non-standard extensions to make the code runnable on Postgres; and it's released under the GPL).
In the initial survey group, the number of difficult-to-convert documents
(for example containing complex macros or office-related functionality not
available on OOo) was very small. In another (non EU-sponsored) migration
project, we have found that macros were contained in the internally developed
base document templates used throughout the target administration; the
effort for migrating those to OOo was relatively small and was the only
instance of significant macro usage. Recently developed tools, like Sun's
migration toolkit (part of StarOffice enterprise edition) can be used to
automate a significant part of this initial effort).
User acceptance is in several situations related to habit; just changing the
default application for .doc, .xls, .ppt to OOo raised significantly the
usage percentage, and after a few weeks, practically all users switched to OOo
exclusively. Training intensity was not very high, and the training
material that we have been developed (and that is distributed under a CC
license) has been considered sufficient.
In the initial target group, of all the interviewed users, roughly half
found that OOo 1.1.x was feature-wise comparable to the commercial version
of Office used, while the other half found it less powerful but sufficient
to finish all tasks (it is my personal guess that OOo 2.0 would have made it
a much smaller percentage). Also, the number of processed document was not
dependent on the kind of word processor used. In some cases, more problem were reported by users that had access to both
OOo and Office, because they were expecting exactly the same behavior from
both applications. Removing Office reduced significantly the complaint rate.
Flexibility is definitely a plus; one of the PAs reported that several very
old PCs were in use, and for budget reasons had to be kept in use (166 MHz
pentiums with 96M of ram, unable to run XP for example). Using XFCE allowed
the administration to put those machines to good use, making an upgrade
unnecessary.
And now for some non-COSPA related results I have collected during
these years of performing migrations:
It is possible to classify the difficulties of the migration under three
different areas: procedural (or managerial), social, and technical. In
general, the technical difficulties are not as prevalent or significant as
some commercial vendors would claim; in our experience user acceptance (a
social issue) is much more important. Some steps can be significantly
simplified with some attention to the user "ecology"; for example, it is
easy to identify the "local experts" within a company or an administration --
those experts may be in many cases happy to have such a recognized (albeit
in a non-official way) higher technical status among their colleagues, and
are usually called for informal help on technical questions. Targeting those
users with higher-level courses and training has a limited impact on costs
but raises morale and helps in maintaining a positive attitude that is then
spread to all the other people performing the migration. Examples of
procedural problems have been found by some partners while ordering PCs
without Windows, and discovering that it was much more difficult and
(paradoxically) costlier than the default acquisition process.
Many problems are related to trivially solvable things; for example, on
Linux, font issues arise when importing documents and can be solved with free
fonts (NOT the WebFont pack from Microsoft, I wish to stress -- there are very good font
alternatives developed by third parties, like for example the Microsoft-like fonts made by the Munjoy Linux project, using the Vera fonts as a base.) Other reported problems
were solved by changing the default margins in OOo, or installing separate
components to adapt to the local environment, or in some cases using Wine to
run Internet Explorer (while waiting for the adaptation of the web interface
to Mozilla or khtml-based browsers). By the way, this adaptation effort can
be seen in many municipality-developed Linux distribution, mainly based on
Debian and slightly adapted to reduce the initial impact; some examples are
MAX (Madrid Linux), Munich's LiMux, Vienna's Wienux and so on. Within COSPA we
have also performed a comparative analysis of more than 40 distributions to
help in the initial selection by the PAs that are performing the Linux
migration, and we have found several quite suitable to be used as a regular
desktop (the main remaining problem seem to be related to hardware support
for some WiFi chipsets or some graphic cards). There are also several
packages that are not that commonly used but are quite important in a commercial
or public administration setting; for example, we had found the wonderful
tn5250j (a java-based terminal emulator for IBM minicomputers) that has more
features than commercial equivalents. We collected in the beginning of 2004
some screens and flash videos of them, if someone is interested, at
http://desktop.conecta.it/screenshots.html.
There are four significant technologies that can greatly reduce the
migration shock, and those are remote computing (like Microsoft terminal
services, Citrix ICA, Sun's Tarantella, NX/FreeNX and plain X11) that allow
to consolidate and redistribute still unported applications across
heterogeneous platforms, web interfaces (both plain vanilla or AJAX-based)
that are becoming the norm for most applications within public
administrations, web-deployed rich clients (like JNLP or flash-based
interfaces delivered through the web, or Eclipse-RCP based) and as a last
resort emulation (using non-free tools like VMware or Qemu/Kqemu/qvm86).
These can be seen as long-term trends in general, as they reduce the
maintenance cost of handling a large number of desktops, and so I am
expecting this to continue independently of the Open Source/Open Document
push.
And last: don't try a migration just because it is something that seems
nice; a migration (any migration -- just ask large companies that switched on
WinXP Service Pack2) is a complex endeavour that requires some planning
and realism. It may be better to do a shifted migration (not all at the same
time), creating non-migrated islands to help in the transition, or phase in
new technologies in a progressive way. The nice thing is that Open Source is
flexible, and once you have a stable result you can start enhancing or
improving a solution in an incremental way quite easily.
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Authored by: MathFox on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 01:42 PM EDT |
If any...
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When people start to comment on the form of a message, it is a sign that they
have problems to accept the truth of the message.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- data *are*, not data *is* - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 01:48 PM EDT
- Munjoy Linux project link incorrect - Authored by: jesse on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:29 PM EDT
- 3rd para.... - Authored by: dave booth on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:44 PM EDT
- 3rd para.... - Authored by: PJ on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 04:41 PM EDT
- It's "sneak peek" - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:44 PM EDT
- Corrections here - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:49 PM EDT
- Careful now - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 05:55 PM EDT
- Careful now - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 06:09 PM EDT
- Corrections here - Authored by: wood gnome on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 04:05 PM EDT
- Four - Authored by: Felix_the_Mac on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 05:24 PM EDT
- Jesus Gonzale - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 06:23 PM EDT
- Grammer - Pot and Kettle - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 09:01 PM EDT
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Authored by: MathFox on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 01:44 PM EDT |
For Open Source legal issues unrelated to the article.
Please post links in HTML, Clickable links: <a
href="http://www.example.com/">Like this</a>
---
When people start to comment on the form of a message, it is a sign that they
have problems to accept the truth of the message.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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- This Land Was Your Land, Now It Is My Land - Authored by: TheBlueSkyRanger on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:11 PM EDT
- What a great day for FOSS - Authored by: tiger99 on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 03:18 PM EDT
- Does the team think....... - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 03:49 PM EDT
- MS Office, still born - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 04:40 PM EDT
- Vote Against Software Patents - Authored by: pajamian on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 05:57 PM EDT
- Open Source Replacement for MS Outlook and MS Project - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 06:53 PM EDT
- My default application for .doc files ... - Authored by: sk43 on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 07:37 PM EDT
- COSPA (off-topic) - Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 24 2005 @ 04:22 PM EDT
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:07 PM EDT |
Removing Office reduced significantly the complaint rate.
Actually
this is a very common experience even absent the introduction of OOo. Many of
my clients, especially the authors and journalists, are happier with
Wordpad.
-Wang-Lo.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: rwelty on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 02:13 PM EDT |
... And once you have a stable result you can start enhancing or improving a
solution in an incremental way quite easily.
this is a key piece of
advice -- it's important to avoid forklift upgrades when you have the option of
nibbling the problem to death. if a forklift upgrade goes bad, everybody
suffers.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: tiger99 on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 03:10 PM EDT |
Thanks, Carla and PJ, for a really useful article. This will be going to my
management at work at the earliest opportunity. It fits well with my own
small-scale experience, indeed it backs up what I have been saying for some time
now. My major thought on the matter is that very few employees were actually
ever trained on M$ Office, so why should we need to be trained on OOo? You
should just be able to pick up things like that and use them, and it
seems that many people have achieved exactly that, which is encouraging. We
are almost all running Win2000, and the company does not want to upgrade to XP,
so here is their chance to save lots of money and get rid of numerous problems.
We will not need major hardware updates for a while, nearly everyone has a
decent P4, but if we could save costs here, some of us could maybe have decent
large LCD screens. And having just downloaded the latest fine version of OOo, I
already like the Math program. [ Reply to This | # ]
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- O! - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 04:10 PM EDT
- Sorry! - Authored by: tiger99 on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 04:53 PM EDT
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Authored by: overshoot on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 04:19 PM EDT |
and as a last resort emulation (using non-free tools like VMware or
Qemu/Kqemu/qvm86).
There's now a gratis "player" for VMWare virtual
machines. That means that in extremis the IT department can prepare an
MS virtual machine and simply copy the files to a client where the "player"
executes the VM.
This should make client license administration much easier,
although of course the MS stuff would still need a license.
One approach
that I like is to have the VM running on a shared server, and since the UI is
handled by X the user can be remote with no problems. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Einhverfr on Thursday, October 20 2005 @ 08:47 PM EDT |
Very well written article. One question I would have is:
1) What was the original planned timetable?
2) What is the current projected timeline?
IME people usually well underestimate the labor involved in migration. Yet, if
it is planned well, it can be done over time without being that much more
expensive than normal.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 21 2005 @ 07:23 AM EDT |
In its current edition, the german C't computer magazine has a comparison of the
two office suites. Unfortunately, the article is not available online, but I can
give you the short version:
The C't editorial staff thinks that MS Office and Open Office are approximately
equal in quality. In specific tasks, there were significant quality differences
but there was overall test winner.
IIRC that is a first:
In the last test of this kind, one or two years ago, C't acknowlegded that Open
Office did some things well, but still saw MS Office as overall winner.
This time, their conclusion was that it depends on what you want to do. For some
tasks, MS Office wins, for others, Open Office wins.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 21 2005 @ 12:02 PM EDT |
I would like to add my thanks for a useful article. I have migrated a number of
clients to OOo and Linux, but the article contained a couple of details that had
escaped my notice.
One area that has been difficult, when migrating from Windows to Linux in Asia,
has been support for less common languages. For all its faults, Windows 2K, 2K3
and XP have rather good support for most world languages. Support in Linux,
even in mainstream distributions, is much more spotty. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, October 21 2005 @ 01:39 PM EDT |
Houghton Mifflin Company's usage board is 60% in favor of "data is",
and 77% in favor of "very little data" (as opposed to "very few
data"). According to their blurb (found via the "definition" link
from Google), most scientists and researchers use the word "data" like
the word "information", although it persists in having a secondary
meaning as the plural of "datum", which is used to refer to
individually distinguishable pieces of information. So you might be right
historically and derivationally, but Norma Loquendi is against you these days.
So unless you're talking about an unsummarized collection of data points, or you
use "assets" and "cherries" as singulars, you're being
inconsistant in your language use.[ Reply to This | # ]
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