Largo rolls out OpenOffice.org, looks at Gnome

A tip we received yesterday led us to contact the City of Largo, Florida, to run down a rumor about a move from KDE to Ximian Gnome desktops at the city. We learned that although the city is considering such a shift, no decision has yet been made. As reported in NewsForge.com about this same time last year, Largo has managed to provide essential IT services for less than half what small cities usually allocate in their budgets for IT through its utilization of open source solutions.

We checked first with Novell spokesman Kevan Barney. He told us that he had not heard anything about such a migration, so we went directly to City of Largo’s IT Manager, Harold Schomaker, and asked him.

Schomaker said “We are currently in the process of testing the Gnome desktop. We’ve actually got it running on approximately a dozen workstations, but we’ve got a couple of other large projects we’re working on and we haven’t had time to sit down and make that decision.”
One of those other projects is the roll-out of OpenOffice.org. Schomaker told us “We are in the midst of doing a full migration to OpenOffice.org city-wide.”

That’s over 800 seats, but Schomaker said the “The roll-out is not the hard part. The hard part is migrating the old WordPerfect documents. That’s what we’re doing right now.”

That’s why we are not able to tell you if Largo is going to migrate from KDE to Gnome desktops or not. Schomaker said to check back with them in late January. Stay tuned.