"The municipal government of Munich, Germany released a statement yesterday that the migration of its office PCs to Linux and OpenOffice.org, which was scheduled to be completed in 2005, has slipped to at least next year," reports Ars Technica. "The original plan, which involved switching all 14,000 of the city's desktop PCs from Windows NT 4 and Microsoft Office to Linux and OpenOffice.org at a cost of €30 million (US$35 million) was proposed in May 2003."
Part of the reason for the delay is the need, identified by project leader Peter Hofmann, for an additional "pilot phase" to be run in the first half of 2006, where a single PC running Linux and OpenOffice.org will be placed in each department. "It became clear later in the planning phase that a pilot was more important than we first thought and should last longer," Hofmann said. Once the pilot is completed, departments plan to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS) in either one or two steps:
"Some departments will start with OpenOffice on Windows, others will start with OpenOffice on Linux," Hofmann said. "It depends on their infrastructure, for example, if a department has a small number of simple (Office) macros and templates, but a large number of complex applications, it is easier to do OpenOffice on Windows first."
Comment: And if you have lots of complex applications and lots of macros and templates....
