The Incubator Club

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Migrating to Open Source Software

Open Source on the desktop offers by far the largest savings for the majority of organisations. However the change must be undertaken in a series of well planned stages.

Guidelines that should be considered are:

• before starting - have a clear understanding of the reasons for migrating;
• ensure that there is active support for the change from IT staff and users;
• ensure that there is a champion for change - the higher up the organisation the better;
• build up expertise and relationships with the OSS movement;
• start with non-critical systems;
• ensure that each step in the migration is manageable;
• start by building pilots and gaining hands-on practical experience.

Migrating your IT systems provides an opportunity for them to be re-engineered to meet the new demands placed on them. Questions that need to be addressed include:

• how to ensure seamless interoperability of systems?
• how to support mobile users?
• how to securely identify users? How to best use smart cards / tokens?
• how to build systems that are manageable?

Above all how to ensure security is designed in from the start and not tacked on as an afterthought?

netproject's experience helping organisations migrate to Open Source can be seen from the popularity of the Migration Guidelines that were developed by netproject in association with the European Commission and most European member states. Over 100,000 copies of these guidelines were downloaded in the first two weeks after publication. They have also been translated into French, Spanish and now into Russian.