A good piece from the Guardian's Charles Arthur yesterday, reporting teacher and Windsor & Maidenhead councillor Liam Maxwell's analysis, of how much councils could save by switching to Open Document Format, as used in OpenOffice.org: some £200M if all councils did this for all their staff. There was some background to this, about the problems encountered by Windsor and Maidenhead, on Computer Weekly's site on Wedensday.
The key stumbling block for councils, as for schools, appears to be compatibility with others systems, most notably those supplied by Capita. Liam calls for the Cabinet Office to strengthen its present position on open source and open standards by mandating ODF as a standards across the public sector, were this to happen I don't doubt that we'd see Capita quickly make SIMS and their other products compatible with OpenOffice.org, making it far easier for schools and councils to choose their office suite from all those available, rather than forcing them to pay for MS Office, bundled with 'features' which many will rarely if ever use. Charles seems to think that such a requirement is far more likely with Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office than it had ever been under the previous administration, even in Tom Watson's day.
Charles' research suggests that the annual running costs for a central government desktop are some £800-£1600, compared to just £130 in Extremadura, Spain where the switch to open source has already been made. Any members have cost per PC or cost per pupil figures for their schools?
Comment space below Charles' post includes a link to Joe Gardiner's analysis of how the DFT could save £770K pa by switching to open source for it's web hosting.
Liam Maxwell's point about Office being integrated into Capita's offerings is an important one. Whenever a school wants to print end of term reports, SIMS shells out (unseen) to Word in order to format and print each report. Whenever a teacher wants to write a report, SIMS shells to Word in order to spell-check the text. And so on.
i.e. this is not simply a matter of producing output which is in ODF rather than DOC or DOCX format, the integration between SIMS and Office runs much much deepr than that, so I can't help but be pessimistic, knowing how long it takes Capita to make even relatively small changes to their software.
I'm pretty sure one of Capita's long-term strategies will be cloud-compatible software - but that'll be the Micosoft flavour of course. Cloud in terms of storage - but programming integration? It'll take YEARS for Capita to move away from Office even if they start right now. It took them a long time to change from SIMS to SIMS.net and it'll take as long to get rid of the .net stuff.
I certainly agree Capita have no incentive to change their strategy - unless forced. Of course schools don't have to use SIMS.
This from one who was forced to use SIMS for a few years and who has escaped its clutches. No regrets.
Not only does SIMS require office installed for those tasks, it requires office to be installed in the default location... installing it somewhere else broke SIMS reports last time I tried.
Bear in mind also that as Capita is a Microsoft Gold Partner it is in their interest to integrate tightly with MS products to sweeten that relationship
It might even be a deliberate decision to integrate that tightly, of course Hanlon's Razor probably applies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I'm not so sure its a big job, the Open office apis are pretty well documented and supported and most of the bugs are ironed out. We had to do some work around them for PrimaryPad and it was relatively painless.
What I like is the idea that you could do your thing in your MIS then openoffice could be running in headless mode on the sims server itself. In theory this would mean your document processing should be faster (as it's done on a beefy server).
One last thing to note is that when we say Open Office is completely open source, there is a lot of politics going on around Java and we should appreciate the values of ODF but also be mindful that change must show value to the end user. A short term cost saving doesn't always cut it.
Thanks for the update Phil.
Does replacing one proprietary standard with your own really solve the issue?
Out of curiosity: Have you considered looking at pushing from SIMS to google docs or live @ edu via their APIs as a way of leveraging web based tools? This is slightly off on a tangent but that's how I roll. I also recognise that doesn't encourage O/S but it increases accessibility somewhat..
As a side note: It is great to see Phil being so pro-active in taking part in this conversation.
Johnny we won't be creating any new proprietary standards just avoiding shelling out to another application in order to achieve a task. What we need to avoid next time is becoming "slaves" to changes in other people's software as each version/patch could break the solution and so needs through testing and that's not a productive use of our resources.
The outputs will be to open standards files so that any WP that supports the standard can be used.
BTW many thanks for the warm welcome!
ISO 26300 has been the agreed international open document format for a few year now. The other obvious way to organise information is in web formats so HTML5 perhaps for the immediate future. We had a discussion about OOo and SIMS at Capita HQ 5 years ago (SchoolforgeUK - John Ingleby and myself). So this isn't new. Sure there is some commercial risk in investing in development but then again there is risk in not doing so. While integrating internationally agreed open standards into SIMS might have seemed expensive at the time, it might well turn out that it would have been a lot less expensive than not doing so. The software environment we are using to have this conversation is Open Source and has the design structure and resources to integrate to just about any database application. It would be quite feasible to produce a module for publishing quite complex page layouts with the technology already available.
Hmm this thread seems to veering off topic I may as well add my 2 cents :)
Our MIS system uses a more open data standard in that all reports can be produced as csv data or PDF. We are also allowed direct access to the sql data so that the production of Facility to Moodle and MIS to Moodle modules were developed without need for a special license to do so.
I can remember when using floppy discs was considered an open standard to share data as everyone had a floppy drive in their machine! So in someways an open standard can sometimes be the most widely used standard, so to fetch this thread back on topic. One of the projects we are implementing at our school is that we are setting up custom policies for Open Office (which is to become our main office tool) so that saved files default to MS office doc files. This then enables staff and learners to use doc files in either Office or Open Office at home at school.
For our school this was the most efficient way of allowing the maximum number of people to use electronic office documents in a multitude of locations on the widest number of devices.
Just for the record, SIMS can output to csv and doc too. It's also got a IMS link that can service a VLE and that's free of any additional charge.
Old news, and off topic, but back in March '09 the Guardian itself made the move to openoffice.org.
More recently, the Guardian launched their open platform , and have been doing fine work campaigning for open access to public sector datasets, such as ordnance survey mapping data. OK, I know there are some huge data protection issues, but I'm sure there are some significant findings just waiting for the right data-mining applications to crawl school MIS's and VLE log files.