Schleswig-Holstein’s migration to LibreOffice reaches 80% completion, with a one-time €9 million investment on cards for 2026.
Schleswig-Holstein’s migration to LibreOffice reaches 80% completion, with a one-time €9 million investment on cards for 2026.
Because when something goes wrong they can know nothing, call someone and say ‘fix it now’ and they would. That support line is gone. Ideally they should have a few of these people on staff. Well see.
RHEL exists… linux isnt just for sweaty nerds in basements, it’s also for sweaty enterprise desktop end users…
If external professional support is needed they could just buy it too. One of the bigger Linux companies, SUSE, is even from Germany, and still operates out of Nürnberg (or “Nuremberg” for people who are more familiar with the anglicized name).
That’s nonsense. Just because something is open source, doesn’t mean that support doesn’t exist.
That’s not what he is saying. Quit that strawman bullshit.
It’s not exactly a secret that competence for Microsoft Solutions is far more frequent than competence of various Linux solutions, if someone built that solution at all.
At my work, If a windows user gets a windows related problem, we probably have hundreds of people that can fix it.
If a Linux user get a Linux related problem. If they can’t fix it themselves, then IT probably can’t fix it either. Not because our IT is useless, but because the Linux guys know know Linux better than IT. So we’d have to call in a contractor to help them.
And they are not cheap. Because there’s not a lot of Linux experts right now.
Have you tried calling that problem a feature and that it’s working as expected? If you do that, magically all your windows problems go away.
I guess you can call in a windows expert to issue you a certificate saying that, whatever floats your boat.
No, we don’t work for Bethesda. We just fix the problems we encounter. But that’s beside the point.
Do you know how many programs there are for Linux to manage the payroll for a large company, with various regional taxes? I do.
its as much about support as its accountability
you have somebody to blame or potentially sue
Just as an example. The state of Schlewsig Holstein has 30,000 workers using LibreOffice. If the service goes down, that means that 30,000 workers can not work any longer, but still get paid. Median hourly wage in Germany is 25€, so for every hour the serivce is down, you pay 750,000€.
That is the level of support you need for a service like this and some forum and a bunch of volunteer devs do not cut that.
So having worked in a few IT departments, I’ve noticed that ones where the general culture is “let’s buy this off the shelf product and a support contract” tend to have a lot more dealing with issues while sitting on their hands and blaming the vendor whereas the departments that are more hands-on and take the approach of “let’s find the right solution and make it work whether or not we can get the vendor support we’d like” tended to have more robust systems, but also more outages due to their own internal errors
So like most decisions in both business and IT it comes down to risk tolerance. I think in the context of your choice of Office suite that risk level is fairly low. Libre Office is an office suite which installs onto the client PC and has minimal integration with outside servers. Its extremely easy to uninstall and reinstall an earlier version if you identify a problem while rolling out an update, and it’s extremely easy to hold a version and not update (which of course comes from security risks, but again, those are not terribly significant compared to other IT contexts)
The main thing in this context that a vendor support contract would provide is the ability to deploy developer resources that are already familiar with the codebasd on a bug if you encounter a problem that’s significant enough. In the case of open source software like Libre Office you get the added benefit of being able to simply spend money on developers and maintain a fork if the upstream project is giving you enough trouble too.
The bigger risks where you will really want a support contract is on the server and network side, because those are much more critical when an issue does arise, may require restoring from backup to rollback and will often have contingency plans as expensive as maintaining warm/cold spares and separate failover regions and hot spares
My experience with microsoft is thst there custom service is terrible
LibreOffice service cant go down, it’s not always online like Microsoft 265
Yes updates break software all the time. It does not even have to be LibreOffice directly. Some OS update can do it.
You people have no idea what you are talking about. LibreOffice isn’t a service. It’s a software package.
Also https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/
Support is a service, so is deploying and maintaining software.
Also the list is a great case in point. If you want them to speak German, looking at the names, you end up with three trainers and a single migration expert. To be fair there seem to be a lot of German speaking developers, but they tend to hate working in support. Just imagine somebody is sick or on vacation.
Also LibreOffice is a large open source project. For smaller ones it is much worse.
That’s a LOT different than the support you can get from Office. Enterprise contracts usually come with guaranteed uptime, 24/7 immediate L3 support, custom hotfixes for specific workflow issues, and much more.
I get that it’s expensive, most people don’t need that, and there should be better options. Unfortunately, there quite often isn’t. The difference between Office and the second best of a huge margin.
On top of that, the integration costs can be massive as all your workflows are built for Office products. At the least, the companies need to find a way to replace all your macros, addins, and queries.
Yeah, that’s the point. Microsoft Office is a service with support and downtime guarantees.
Another European country tried that switch but found that retraining employees was too expensive and inefficient.
Which country?
You wouldn’t know them. They go to a different school.