Danish Board of Technology: Public administration can save billions using Open Source software

Thursday October 10th 2002 the Danish Board of Technology released a
report about the economic potential in using Open Source software in the
public administration which showed a potential at 3.7 billions Danish
Kroners (500 million EUR) over four years.

The main suggestion in the report is using an open exchange format for
text document within the public administration so the competition can be
enhanced and lowering the price.

In Hanstholm municipality they had a pilot project since April which
showed that the don't have more problems using OpenOffice.org and
StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office as their office suite and each user
only needs one to one and half our of training to learn the new office
suite. The municipality will now use OpenOffice.org and StarOffice on all
workplaces (200 in all) and saves 300.000 Danish Kroners (ca. 40.000 EUR)
each year in license fees. They will still use Microsoft Windows as
operating system.

Three Danish political parties from different part of the political
spectrum responded with a demand for Open Source pilot projects in bigger
scale within the public administration.

Århus county could be one of these pilot projects. Now they use
WordPerfect but it will not contain Danish help in future versions because
Danish is a too small market for Corel and the Danish help is crusial.
They will save ca. 10 million Danish Kroners (ca. 1.2 million EUR) each
year with an OpenOffice.org solution instead of a Microsoft Office
solution. They have also budgetted with 1 million Danish Kroners to create
a WordPerfect filter for OpenOffice.org.

Tuesday 15th October 2002 the Nordic Council gave 500.000 Danish Kroners
(ca. 65.000 EUR) to The Danish Consumer Agency to create a Nordic site
about using Open Source software for consumers. The Danish Consumer Agency
has earlier showed that they saved hundred of thousands of Danish Kroners
using an Open Source solution for their website instead of a Unix based
soltuion.

The report is being translated to English - and you have something to look
forward to because this report is the most well documented Open Source
report so far with a lot of references and tests. You can see that the
writers are university people (two associate professors and a professor)
and not a consulting company who writes what the buyer wants to hear.

Link to the report:
http://www.tekno.dk/subpage.php3?article=494&survey=14&language=uk&front=1

Claus Sørensen,
Marketing Contact for OpenOffice.org in Scandinavia
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