Italy's South Tyrol Starts Three-Year LibreOffice Migration

The government of Italy's South Tyrol province this morning announced a plan to implement LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office productivity tools, in all of its public administrations, including municipal administration and healthcare organisations, during the next three years. The plan was unveiled today by the province's Minister for Innovation and Information Technology, Roberto Bizzo.

The past months, the government has been studying the feasibility of replacing the ubiquitous proprietary office tools by LibreOffice. "We conclude that we should gradually phase in LibreOffice, in close contact and dialogue with the administration's civil servants", the government writes in a statement disseminated at a press conference today. "The paradigm shift involved in the broad-scale introduction of free and open source software in office administration calls for a strong commitment to the project from politicians as well as from the highest managerial echelons within the respective administrative bodies."