Category Archives: Tux Migration

Why Health First is dumping MS Office

The Brevard County Florida non-profit healthcare facility, Health First, Inc.is migrating 3,500 PCs with 6,000 users to open source.

In two projects (where Linux is at the heart of both) they are moving infrastructure and desktops to open source applications. “Part 1 of the story is here”:http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid39_gci964811,00.html

Though they are going to save $2M they also note that the key feature is that the functionality is available in OpenOffice that equals and in some cases exceeds MSOffice(tm). The ability to export Acrobat (PDF) and Flash (SWF) files from OpenOffice not only saves the cost of Adobe Acrobat and Macromedia’s Flash utilites but it also lessens the number of applications to track.