DK: 25,000 Hospital Staff Copenhagen Region to Use Open Source Office Suite

Almost all of the 25,000 workers at thirteen hospitals in the Copenhagen region will over the next year begin to use Libre Office, an open source suite of office productivity tools. The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, 'for long term strategic reasons', which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner (about 5.3 million euro) worth of proprietary licences.

The ditching of the proprietary alternative is a consequence of the group's move to virtual desktops, allowing staff members to log in on any PC or thin client. The group found that deploying this new desktop infrastructure would "trigger unacceptably high costs" for proprietary office licenses, says Vivian Thomsen, responsible for IT at the group, quoted by the Danish IT news site Computerworld.