[nzlug] Linux in NZ District Councils?

[Stephen Judd]

On 1/22/07, Richard Thomas <tich at clad.co.nz> wrote:
>
>
> Yes it would assuming that the council isn't locked into using MS Office
> for some reason.  Some places have software that uses Office to
> automatically generate documents from databases and it's unlikely that the
> software will support OpenOffice.

One local govt body I had dealings with a few years ago used a
document management system that depended on Office metadata to
classify docs and on Office macros to integrate with Office. It would
be a major exercise to factor out the dependencies on MS software. The
response when I pointed out that Word documents were not the best way
to store structured text was "but Microsoft is a standard". Really.

I imagine that many local bodies are in situations like that.