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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/opensource/0,3800004943,39154084,00.htm

OpenOffice gets in with French taxman
Just three short 'man-years' for Office libération...

By Ingrid Marson

Published: Thursday 10 November 2005

The French tax agency, which manages the taxes of all states and cities in France, plans to deploy the open source office productivity application OpenOffice.org on thousands of its PCs.

In an interview, chief technical officer at the French tax agency, Jean-Marie Lapeyre, said it plans to migrate 80,000 desktops from Microsoft Office 97 to OpenOffice.org next year.

The migration is expected to cut the agency's costs by €29.3m, compared with the cost of switching to Office XP. The agency has calculated it will only take three man-years to be "completely independent" of Microsoft Office, according to Lapeyre.

It may also consider migrating to Linux desktops in the future, although Lapeyre said this would require much more work.

Ingrid Marson writes for ZDNet UK