TDF releases White Paper to help migrations to LibreOffice

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Berlin, March 27, 2013 - The Document Foundation releases a white paper to help organizations migrate to LibreOffice. Published on Document Freedom Day, the text explains how governments and enterprises can leverage Free Software to lower their IT expenditures and get rid of proprietary software lock-in.

Link to white paper: http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/tdf-migrationwhitepaper1.pdf.

According to the white paper, migrations to Free Software - and especially to LibreOffice - should follow a carefully crafted change management process, which needs to handle not only the technical aspects, which are actually the easiest ones to cope with, but also the barriers met when breaking long-term working habits.

LibreOffice liberates the users from proprietary document formats by adopting natively ODF (Open Document Format), which is the standard document format recognized by the largest number of organizations and supported by the largest number of desktop software (including Microsoft Office).

In addition, LibreOffice offers the largest set of import filters for proprietary document formats (including Microsoft Office, Publisher, Visio and Works, plus Corel Draw, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPro, Quattro Pro and WordPerfect), and thus protects user investments in legacy applications, while providing a migration path to ODF.

Last but not least, LibreOffice templates are using only free fonts available on every OS which can be installed independently from any software package and thus foster interoperability between GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows users as documents maintain their original layout on every platform.

LibreOffice is immediately available for download from the following link: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/. Extensions for LibreOffice are available from the following link: http://extensions.libreoffice.org/extension-center.

LibreOffice users, free software advocates and community members can support The Document Foundation with a donation at http://donate.libreoffice.org. Money collected will be used to maintain the infrastructure, and support events and marketing activities to increase the awareness of the project, both at a global and local level.

Short link to blog post: http://wp.me/p1byPE-n4.