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wow.  Six years and all they have migrated are 2,500 out of 14,0000 desktops!  The curse of the Microsoft Productivity Environment strikes again as legacy workgroups, workflows and the mesh of compound documents that drive them prove to be very stubborn.  The funny thing is that, as Munich struggles with this 1995 level desktop transition, Microsoft is preparing to move those very same legacy productivity environments to a proprietary Web Productivity Platform.  I wonder what Munich's Web plans are? excerpt: Schießl says the transition required enormous background effort which involved eliminating many IT dependencies created by individual vendors over the years. More than 20,000 templates had to be consolidated and converted into new templates, macros or web applications. Most templates and text blocks are now managed via the WollMux program, which was released in 2008. Schießl said that the developers also had to adapt a number of corporate applications such as SAP for use with ODF. According to the review, another achievement in 2009 was the establishment of Linux client pilot areas as a step towards the final aim of migrating all twelve of the city administration's departments to Linux. Schießl says this was the last fundamental step required to enable general client migration in the coming years. Although only 2,500 of around 14,000 workstations have been converted to the custom-built basic LiMux client, the hardest part was to get them all up and running, which required going over inconsistent IT infrastructures that had developed over the years and training the IT staff for the technical switch. As Robert Pogson observes in his blog, six and a half years after the decision was made to switch to free software, the Munich Linux pioneers have completed about 80 per cent of the project's total workload.

Finally! Someone who gets it. For an office suite to be considered as an alternative to MSOffice, it must be designed with multiple levels of compatibility. It's not just that the "feature sets" that must be comparable. The guts of the suite must be compatible at both the file format level, and the environment level. Randall put's it this way; "It's the ecosystem stupid". The reason ODF failed in Massachusetts is that neither OpenOffice nor OpenOffice ODF are designed to be compatible with legacy and existing MSOffice applications, binary formats, and, the MSOffice productivity environment. Instead, OOo and OOo-ODF are designed to be competitively comparable. As an alternative to MSOffice, OpenOffice and OpenOffice ODF cannot fit into existing MSOffice workgroups and producitivity environments. Because it s was not designed to be compatible, OOo demands that the environment be replaced, rebuilt and re-engineered. Making OOo and OOo-ODF costly and disruptive to critical day-to-day business processes. The lesson of Massachusetts is simple; compatibility matters. Conversion of workgroup/workflow documents from the MSOffice productivity environment to OpenOffice ODF will break those documents at two levels: fidelity and embedded "ecosystem" logic. Fidelity is what most end-users point to since that's the aspect of the document conversion they can see. However, it's what they can't see that is the show stopper. The hidden side of workgroup/workflow documents is embedded logic that includes scripts, macros, formulas, OLE, data bindings, security settings, application specific settings, and productivity environment settings. Breaks these aspects of the document, and you stop important business processes bound to the MSOffice productivity environment. There is no such thing as an OpenOffice productivity environment designed to be a compatible alternative to the MSOffice productivity environment. Another lesson from Massach