Italian army switches to LibreOffice

The Italian Ministry of Defense will switch to LibreOffice in the next year and a half. This involves approximately 150,000 workstations, making it Europe’s second largest LibreOffice implementation. The migration will start in October and should be completed by the end of 2016.

The migration project was announced on Tuesday by LibreItalia. With LibreOffice, the ministry is also switching to the Open Document Format, or ODF. The roll-out of the project is supervised by the NGO LibreItalia and the Ministry of Defence. LibreItalia will help the Ministry train trainers and the Ministry will develop several online courses to help staff transition to LibreOffice.

The LibreItalia organization writes on its own website that the switch is the result of a law passed in June 2012. This law states that free and open source software must be the standard within the country’s public institutions. With this switch, the Ministry of Defense is the first part of the central government to switch to an open source office program. Yet it is not the first Italian government service to make the step to LibreOffice, reports the message on the site of ISA, the organization that deals with interoperability solutions for European governments. Nearly ten provinces and cities in Italy are already working with the package, including the province of Perugia and the city of Bologna.

The largest government that uses the open source software package is the French Ministère de l’Intérieur with around 240,000 workplaces that use LibreOffice, following a tender procedure in 2011. Other well-known governments that use oss to a greater or lesser extent are the German city of Munich and the Spanish province of Extremadura.