The Document Foundation welcomes France's MIMO in the Advisory Board

announce
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MIMO (Inter-Ministry Mutualisation for an Open Productivity Suite)
represents several bodies of the French government, and fosters the
diversity of TDF Advisory Board by adding the voice of 500,000
professional users

Berlin, June 17, 2013 - The Document Foundation (TDF) announces that
MIMO - the working group of the French government including several
ministries and administrations [1], for a total of 500,000 desktops - is
now an official member of the foundation's Advisory Board. MIMO primary
goal is to give CIOs and their staff a way to share experience on office
suites and operating systems, in order to speed up desktop modernisation.

MIMO is focused on the free desktop, and is one of a number of working
groups focusing each one on a specific area of the information system
under the guidance of the DISIC (French state CIO). Together, the
working groups are creating an official set of free software for the
ministries, with a specific application for each task.

MIMO has standardised on LibreOffice, developed by the Document
Foundation, and is contributing to the development of the office suite
through a commercial support agreement provided by certified developers.
The role of MIMO is to validate successive versions of LibreOffice and
make them compatible with the IT infrastructure and processes of member
ministries. A single, standard LibreOffice version is validated and
approved every year, according to the roadmap planned by MIMO members

To be approved, a version of LibreOffice is submitted to a qualification
process: the software is tested to verify its compatibility with other
business applications, and becomes a certified MIMO version only after
all QA tests have been passed. The Ministry of Interior - for example -
has a ten-step qualification process, with tests including compatibility
with business applications, macros and deployment tools. The decision is
taken by all the members representing the ministries.

MIMO is joining the current 8 members of TDF Advisory Board - Google,
Intel, Lanedo, Red Hat, SUSE, Freies Office Deutschland e.V., Software
in the Public Interest (SPI) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) -
and will be represented by Laure Patas d'Illiers, of the Department of
Treasury and Finance of the French government.

[1] Ministries: Agriculture, Culture, Defense, Economy, Education,
Environment, Finance, Interior, Justice. Administrations: CAF (Family
Allocation Funds), DILA (Direction of Legal / Administrative
Information), ENA (National Administration School), National Assembly.

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

About MIMO

The MIMO working group was created by the Agency for Digital Development
in Administration (ADAE) in 2005, under the governance of the Prime
Minister. Since 2011, MIMO has been controlled by DISIC (Direction
Interministérielle des Systèmes d'Information et de Communication),
whose mission is to coordinate IT policy in French administrations.
DISIC has launched working groups on cloud computing, the organisation
and planning of IT systems, and Open Source. MIMO and the Open Source
working group are managed by the CIO of the Ministry of Culture
(Ministère de la Culture).