Galicia to switch first 1000 workstations to Libre Office

The autonomous region of Galicia (Spain) will this year migrate at least one-thousand government workstations to exclusively use the LibreOffice open source suite of office solutions, it announced on 30 April. The government also said it would start raising awareness among the region's public administrations about the advantages of sharing, and promoting the reuse of ICT solutions. The government has reserved a 147,000 euro budget for this year's free software actions.

The government announced that it would involve the three universities in Galicia, representatives of the region's free software service providers and the local free software user groups in the project. The groups aim to increase knowledge and use of free software in government, businesses and society, the government writes in a statement.

The region's 2014 Free Software Action Plan was published by Amtega, Galicia's agency for technological modernisation, on the free software portal Mancomum. The agency, responsible for the regional free software resource centre, will continue to help other public administrations with advice and technical support. Amtega will continue to offer its software repository, the 'Forxa de Mancomun'. It is to publish a best practices guide and will continue to assist public administrations with publishing their ICT solutions as open source, so others can reuse them.

Websites

Galicia's Free Software Plan foresees training of civil servants in solutions including the office suite Apache OpenOffice and R, software used for statistical analysis. It plans the use of free software solutions such as Drupal and Liferay for government websites and web-portals, including for the Department of Economy and Industry, Department of Labour and the Department of the Exchequer.

Other free software solutions that will be promoted to the region's public administrations include Arpad, Galicia's document management system, based on Alfresco. The Free Software Plan anticipates the development of business intelligence solutions combining Jasper Reports, Pentaho and the Birt Project.

Amtega's free software resource centre will help implement notification services for citizens and business, reusing Notific@, a solution that is developed by the government of Andalucía. "This implementation will set an example for the reuse of free software shared by other public administrations", the government writes in its Free Software Plan.

Translations

The Free Software Plan anticipates the modernisation of the government's data centres, aiming to standardise these on servers that support the use of GNU/Linux operating systems. The plan aims to ensure that these data centres support the use of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation.

Galicia's free software resource centre is finalising translations into English of the slides of the presentation on 30 April. They will be made available on the Mancomun portal this week.

More information:

Statement by the Xunta of Galicia (in Galician)
Galicia's 2014 Free Software Action Plan
Amtega, Galicia's agency for technological modernisation
Mancomun news item (in Galician)
Mancomun report on Galicia's Free Software Action Plan (in Galician)
Forxa de Mancomun, Galicia's free software repository
Notific@ developed by the Government of Andalucía