Our goal for the meeting was also to establish credibility, trust and lay grounds for future relations and I think we succeeded in that. The city is investigating possible migration paths, and immediately as the first step Helsinki is going to install OpenOffice on all city workstations alongside the current MS Office. It is hard to tell what Markku Rautio's true opinion and intentions about the issue was, but there is a possibility that things would start to go in a good direction. We'll now just have to wait and see what happens. Microsoft is also likely to strike back in some way.
The city of Helsinki has to start somewhere, and installing OpenOffice is a well-trodden migration path to Free Software. Keeping them going down that path will probably require continuous prodding, but getting them to walk in this direction at all is probably the most difficult thing to do -- and you've already achieved that.
One discussion item was who would be able to provide Open Office support (user support mainly, but probably also technical, such as helping with security patch distribution etc.) to an organisation of this size (40.000 employees). What are the experiences from elsewhere?
It would seem as a lucrative contract (e.g. 4 years) for someone acting in the field, even if Open Office is new to the organisation. The pricing is of course difficult, if there is little experience on migrations and day-to-day support. Getting a bigger vendor to be able to offer something like this would be of course of great help in all future transitions.
Martin
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