Bristol City Council (South West England, about an hour from me) are rolling out Sun’s StarOffice to 3,500 PC’s.

Quite interesting for the Open Source sector, MS Office is very expensive in comparison to StarOffice, I can go and buy a retail version of Office 2003 Professional (to include Access) for £337. The StarOffice site has a Small Office/Home Office version for about £45.

I’ve tried OpenOffice (a bit of a kind of cut down version of StarOffice) and like it, but never had enough time, or motivation if I’m honest, to really learn to use it as well as I can use MS Office. For a free product, OpenOffice is very good, I’m guessing that Bristol, and the other places trialing StarOffice, feel they need something a bit mroe than free OpenSource software, and StarOffice provides some middle ground.

Still, nice to see. I was with another council while they were trying to move from Corel Office Suite to MS Office 2000. Absolute nightmare when you see how much data is stored in little databases and spreadsheets with macros and things all over the place. Very large conversion job. Good luck to them!

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