Flutterby™! : Migrating to Linux

LiMux - the IT evolution - An open source success story like never before. On Munich's migration to a Linux, KDE & OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

One of these, and perhaps the toughest job of all, turned out to be the switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice/LibreOffice. At some point during the planning phase the administrators had to acknowledge that they had never previously had a clue how many individual macros, templates and forms were crucial to the daily work of the city's departments. When the migration team started to make lists, more and more of these Microsoft-specific add-ons popped up, with nobody remembering who had programmed them and no information about how they worked. Project representatives started to call them U-Boote (submarines), since they seemed to appear from nowhere. A typical problem started with an employee saying: “I don't know, all I am doing is hitting STRG+SHIFT+F4 all day.”