You want how much?! Israel opts not to renew its Office 365 vows Microsoft’s desire to move users into the exciting world of Office 365 subscriptions has been dealt a blow as the Israeli government took a look and said “no thanks.” In a statement given to The Register, the Israeli Ministry of Finance explained that it currently spends more than 100m Israel New Shekels (£21.3m) per year on …
See https://www.gov.uk/guidance/open-document-format-odf-guidance-for-uk-government
I particularly like the bit where it says 'The UK government has selected ODF 1.2 as the standard for editable office documents to be used across government.'.
Across government. At all levels. Cash-strapped local government authorities please take note. Yes, that means use LO or similar in the schools - not just in the classrooms but for admin too.
What's that noise? Damn, I must have been dreaming.
I don't know why governments are even entertaining the move over to subscription services like O365 you get screwed by moving you costs from CAP-Ex to much more expensive OP-EX and if your supplier decides to hike your prices tomorrow you have no choice but to pay or lose access to everything.
I can see the advantages for smaller org's that don't have the muscle to sort out the infrastructure for themselves but for the big boys, it makes little sense as they have the scale required to force economies.
I can only guess that too many civil servants have been playing buzzword bingo and not looking at the figures and risks properly.
"I can see the advantages for smaller org's that don't have the muscle to sort out the infrastructure for themselves"
OTOH a small org might not have the cash flow to pay the subs reliably. If a bad month means you can't pay the sub and get cut off from an essential service the next month is going to be a whole lot worse.
"I don't know why governments are even entertaining the move over to subscription services like O365"
Because MS has made the on-premise version more expensive than the O365 version, even though the on-premise version is included in the O365 version.
Therefore we subscribed to the O365 version, even though we're not using the online stuff at all.
You basically can't fight MS as long as the users (unaware of the pricing) keep shouting that they need MS Office "since that's what everyone else is using" (their words, not mine).
Schools (which are paid by the government) are also facilitating this by teaching everyone how to use MS Office and providing copies of MS Office at an extremely reduced price.
Schools (which are paid by the government) are also facilitating this by teaching everyone how to use MS Office and providing copies of MS Office at an extremely reduced price.
Surely the schools can be incentivised to allow their staff and pupils to explore alternatives by giving them bonus payments when they teach their kids how to use alternative products. Indeed why not make interoperability a condition of the contract with M$?
Change the curriculum to measure how well the kids know how to use different products, and crucially how to make sure they understand that different products can work together.
The government has the money which M$ wants. Make them work for it, and if they won't, tell 'em to fuck off.
It's not rocket science; you just have to have the mindset that M$ are a supplier that are trying to shaft you, so work out how you can shaft them back. At the end of the day you have the money, so you can always put yourself on the winning side. (Unless you choose to roll over either because you are thick or are receiving thick brown envelopes.)
All publicly owned entities should be using OSS. Governments need to step in and end this idiocy. Where manufactures won't supply drivers, or the specs/apis to create them, those manufacturers should be banned. There are very few countries in the developed world that don't have the expertise to develop a UI/Office/server set of apps that would be more than sufficient. Smaller countries or those with less expertise can simply follow those examples.
Hello:
"I don't know why governments are even entertaining the move over to subscription services like O365"
No?
It's quite simple: it's because there is usually an absolutely unbelievable amount of public money involved in it, which means that there's also an equally unbelievable amount of pork to go around.
Cheers,
O.
"I can see the advantages for smaller org's that don't have the muscle to sort out the infrastructure for themselves"
That seems like an edge case to me. I'm purely speculating here, but it seems to me that an org that is so small that it can't sort out infrastructure is probably also so small that the infrastructure it needs is simple enough that they could sort it out themselves.
"That seems like an edge case to me. I'm purely speculating here, but it seems to me that an org that is so small that it can't sort out infrastructure is probably also so small that the infrastructure it needs is simple enough that they could sort it out themselves."
As someone in this position, I see both sides. We use o365, but that's because we're a dev shop working on MS stuff and get it free though the partner program. If we weren't a dev shop we'd likely not have the infrastructure / skills in house run something like that ourselves.
It takes care of a lot of bits of stuff - AD, Fleet admin, E-Mails, OneDrive, Office, various resilliance and audit issues.. so it probably would be worth the full cost if you were starting out with none of that. Once you learn a little bbit about it, there's also various approahes around to avoid the full costs (I mean the legal ones).
"Or, install a free copy of Ubuntu or whichever distro you choose."
Ever wonder why Red Hat keeps getting business for its Enterprise solution instead of everyone just going to Fedora? There's more to running a business than just the software, after all. Sometimes, the support for the software is more important (and more expensive) than the software itself. There's something about that age-old question, "What price peace of mind?"
"you get screwed by moving you costs from CAP-Ex to much more expensive OP-EX"
For businesses you get to write off the opex off against tax 100% each year vs capex being on a depreciation schedule.
That doesn't apply with governments or public sector of course, except as a notional thing for residual book value.
The scarier thing is that many of the orgs which have waltzed unquestioningly into the arms of office365 or google for outsourced mail have _NOTHING_ in the way of exit plans.
A tip I received from a mate who is in recruitment always publish your CV in pdf format, not as a doc. The various compatibly issues between different flavours of office / LibreOffice can really screw up the formatting of your cv and the recruitment agents will seldom help you out.
I use LibraOffice at home and MS at work. They are 'broadly speaking' compatible but in reality they cock up each others stuff and sorting out those small problems is a ballache.
PDF format deals with some of it but it is by no means a guaranteed way to avoid compatibility issues. I use Nuance at work, others use Adobe. We can still run into issues with PDFs produce on one causing issues but not the other. And PDF is supposed to be a standard format.
The formatting can be a nightmare. We had one supplier turn up with a PowerPoint presentation, our company had standardized on LibreOffice and the meeting room computer had LO on it...
Much "hilarity" ensued as the presentation slides popped up and the workflows shown had arrows running from a wrong box to another wrong box! Luckily they had a printout with them, which was quickly copied and passed around.
On top of that, many telephone systems, ERP, DMS and other business systems have addins for MS Office, but no equivalents for LibreOffice.
@big_D
I do a fair number of presentations. I hope you didn't buy from that supplier, because the presenter is an idiot. Why didn't he bring his own computer with the proper software for his presentation? Or, if he needed to use someone else's computer, save the presentation as a PDF?
All my presentations are done in LibreOffice Impress. When I do the presentation live, of course I have LibreOffice on my laptop. After the original presentation, I then export the LibreOffice file as a PDF, and that gets posted to the web site, and people can view them with no formatting problems.
One slightly annoying LO issue makes me sometimes regret switching to LO. It's that in WORD Selecting FILE - NEW will open a link to my templates (albeit at the top of an annoyingly fussy page), and selecting or navigating to one will open a new document with that template.
But in Writer this just isn't available so simply. The FILE- NEW just opens a blank document in the normal template and instead you need to either chose FILE -TEMPLATES and chose one, which opens the chosen template file as an editble document (so you have to remember to save it as a document or risk over writing the template) or FILE- TEMPLATES -MANAGE TEMPLATES ( and then IMPORT if the template file isn't where LO expects to find it. Which is all much less intuitive.
From my point of view, that's a plus point. It's one less click to the "standard" new document template which I want 99.9% of the time. (Although I agree choosing a template and it becoming a document on opening it would be an advantage since editing a template file is something most people would only ever do rarely and should be the special case, not the other way around))
I've found that a good way to prevent accidentally overwriting a template is to use ($FileExplorer) & change the template properties to Read Only. The next time you open it & change something, attempting to save it usually results in a "Whoops! I can't do that, Dave, it's locked. Give it a different name." dialog box which solves the problem.
Hope that helps! Cheers & enjoy a pint.
@Terry 6 - Another slightly annoying LO issue is that any instructions I find seem to be for a slightly different version... Such as, in my copy (5.1.6.2), the Template Manager can be reached as you describe, or by File - Templates; and double-clicking on a template opens a new document based on it, and there's an Open button that does the same, with an Edit button next to it to edit the template itself.
Intuitive, of course, is highly subjective, until you've received proper indoctrination.
LO does have a bleeding-edge track and a more conservative "stable" track for corporates etc where a less rapid pace of change might be appreciated. Even the fast-track stuff is coming out these days with very little RC-feeling to it and I expect that it will become more and more a development platform for basing the various apps mentioned earlier on. "Stable" has leapfrogged several version levels to be sniffing at the heels of "bleeding-edge" and I think we're going to see LO making major inroads into hitherto closed markets.
>The formatting can be a nightmare. We had one supplier turn up with a PowerPoint presentation, our company had standardized on LibreOffice and the meeting room computer had LO on it...
He didn't bring his own laptop? There's no way I would allow someone from outside the company to bring random powerpoint files and run them on our computers, even if said computers were just conference room PCs.
That being said, I've found LO Impress to be anything but impressive. When compared to PP or Keynote, it's just so shockingly bland that you may as well just display a PDF on the screen.
@ma1010, Ilsa Loving,
they did have a laptop with them, but my (ex-)employer had the meeting room so set up that it had a dedicated PC connected to an embedded screen, with mouse and keyboard wireless onto the table. He was also unwilling to let them use their own laptop.
His fault, not the presenters.
Also, at many symposiums and other events I've been to, you have had to submit your presentation 3 days in advance and it was put on a dedicated laptop that was on the podium, so they could just close your presenation and open the next speakers behind the scenes, no plugging and unplugging devices on the podium between speakers.
" at many symposiums and other events I've been to, you have had to submit your presentation 3 days in advance and it was put on a dedicated laptop that was on the podium, "
3 days in advance is plenty of time to discover problems.
What I see is far too many people showing up hopelessly underprepared and then expecting the local IT folk to drop everything to make it work.
@Alan Brown
3 days in advance is plenty of time to discover problems.
What I see is far too many people showing up hopelessly underprepared and then expecting the local IT folk to drop everything to make it work.
True Dat! Working backstage for a fairly well-known conference (Well, El Reg covers it :-), I lost track of how many times the speakers, who were asked to come "on deck" backstage 5-10 minutes before their talk, showed up with "just a few changes to my slides". Yeah, we developed a process for doing these "diving catches", but it was never smooth, or justified.
An then there's the folks who used snazzy custom fonts in the PPT decks, but did not bring the fonts along... (almost as good as the "file:" URLs for images you'd occasionally see on websites. "Hey, it worked on my machine!")
"And PDF is supposed to be a standard format."
I'v been taking a few PDFs prepared for printers and reformating them for putting on a web site, with a bit of editing of the copy in one case. I'm starting to realise that while PDF is a standard container format what's hidden inside can be as mad as a box of frogs.
@}{amis}{ Unfortunately, sending a CV as something other than a Word .doc may get it immediately round-filed. I discovered this when applying for a Hardware debug and kernel developer, and asked why that requirement. It boiled down to "our buzzword scanner only understands .doc", and that said buzzword scanner was a common bit of software for many HR departments.
YMMV, and maybe being rejected by a company with an insane HR dept. is not the worst outcome.
OTOH, I snuck my CV in the side door directly to the manager who had the open position, and was hired. OTOOH, HR was not the only part of the company suffering from the transition from "founders who know what they are doing" to "Adult supervision all around", and they went under after 3 years. I was acqui-hired by a well known firm that did not have that particular mental illness. They had plenty of their own, home grown insanity, but paid well.
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