LibreUmbria, a migration romance

LibreUmbria is a regional initiative to widely adopt LibreOffice productivity suite on regional and local government, schools and authorities in Umbria Region. The project is supervised by Open Source Competence Center of Umbria Region (CCOS) and managed by Consortium SIR Umbria (the Consortium of Local Authorities for development of innovation and Regional Information System), with the collaboration of The Document Foundation. The pilot phase involved, Umbria Region, SIR, Local Health Authority of Perugia (ASL1), the two Provinces of Perugia and Terni, the School of Public Administration “Villa Umbra”.

LibreUmbria project started in October 2012 with the following purposes:

• Define a suitable methodology to identify scope of work, boundaries, workpakages and action plans of the migration process.

• Describe and share hilights and best practices emerged during the pilot phase of the project to facilitate, promote, dissemenate and reuse pilot experiences. All stuff (project charter, project plan, questionnaires, handbook for trainers, handouts and slides on LibreOffice etc.) is available on the blog project site (www.libreumbria.it) in Creative Commons license.

• Define “marketing” campaigns dedicated to internal users (Politics, Public Servants, Key Users, Tech support) to help people understanding the project prominence.

• Define communication, information and press campaigns to spread key principles of LO migration project and its importance to PA, Citizens and SME.

• Define training plans dedicated to different users, including profiles involved in after-migration support.

• Setup a “survival-kit" to provide end users with pocket support tools and help them in daily operations with informations on how to survive to migration process.

Province of Perugia is the selected pilot authority where the project has already trained and migrated more than a third of existing users and workstations (about 400). They used no more supported office automation sistems, so they decided to migrate their 1000 users to LO suite with a significant cost savings on the purchase of licenses, estimated in 250 K€ by June 2014. LibreUmbria is moreover a tremendous opportunity to review document templates and spreadsheets use to simplify and make them more easy-to-use and accessible to everybody.

Should be important to underline the high level of attention from FLOSS Community and the interest in joining the project by more organizations both in Umbria (Health Authority of Terni (ASL2), University of Perugia and some Municipalities) and in other Italian Regions. The project is moreover spreding involvement to primary and higher schools in Umbria to bring LO experience in the classroom.

LibreUmbria also focus attention on how to simplify daily operations in document management. It was built and released an LO extensions to manage digital signature process from LO menu bar, and a new task has been started to use the LO CMIS integration with Alfresco.