Open standards push Mannheim to Linux

"Most of the problems in Munich are due to resistance from users — they don't want to change to Linux," says Armbruster. "It's important for an open source project that you inform your users — you need to talk with users and speak about their problems."

He is confident that this won't happen with Mannheim's migration. "We haven't seen any resistance from users in the city of Mannheim. We have talked with department managers and power users and they accept our strategy to slowly move to Linux," he says.

The problems with Munich's migration to open source encouraged Armbruster to publicise Mannheim's migration — to show that open source can work.

"Microsoft is probably very happy about the project in Munich because of its problems," he says. "One year ago I didn't want to go public about our migration. I have now gone public because the project in Munich is not a success, but our project is. I wanted to say, 'Here is a city with about 6,000 employees where open source and open standards works already.'"

The OpenOffice.org migration
The first stage in Mannheim's migration to OpenOffice.org — the evaluation of its Microsoft Office documents — started earlier this month. It is using a migration analysis tool called SCAI MAS to analyse 500,000 administration documents to identify which files cannot be automatically converted to OpenOffice.org.

"We expect that maybe 10 or 20 percent of documents will have problems when we move from Word to OpenOffice.org," says Armbruster.

Some of the macros contained within the Microsoft Office documents can be automatically converted into OpenOffice.org macros, but some will need to be reengineered.

The evaluation project is due to be finished in mid-January, after which the IT department will start migrating the first departments to OpenOffice.org. It plans to migrate only two departments in the first year — the IT department plus one additional department.

Although some city employees will not have access to OpenOffice.org for a few years yet, they have already been using at least one open source application for almost two years — the Firefox browser. Armbruster says the city has been using the Mozilla browser since version 0.8 came out in February 2004. Internet Explorer is not used for Internet access for "security reasons".

Tux patiently waits
When Mannheim has finished it migration to OpenOffice.org, it will start its migration to desktop Linux. This delay will not only give the city time to replace those 145 Windows-specific applications with applications that will run on Linux, but it should also...