​Italian Ministry of Defense moves to LibreOffice

In Rome, the LibreItalia Association NGO, a non-profit group devoted to promoting the LibreOffice open-source office-suite, announced that the Italian Ministry of Defense Information Systems is adopting LibreOffice. This means that 150,000 desktops will be switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice.

This deployment will be jointly managed by the two organizations. The migration will based on The Document Foundation's LibreOffice Migration Protocol.

In addition to switching to LibreOffice, the ministry will adopt the ISO standard Open Document Format (ODF) for official government documents. Last year, the United Kingdom made ODF its official government document format.

In this migration partnership, the Ministry of Defense will develop educational content for a series of LibreOffice online training courses. These will be released to the community under the Creative Commons CC0 license. LibreItalia volunteers will train the military LibreOffice trainers

In Italy, the Ministry of Defense is the first central public administration to migrate to open-source software for office productivity. Regional and local government organizations such as Regione Emilia Romagna; the Provinces of Perugia, Cremona, Macerata, Bolzano, and Trento; and the cities of Bologna, Piacenza, and Reggio have already moved to LibreOffice.

The migration project will begin in October 2015 with the first training course and will be completed by the end of 2016.

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