Open Office

Trials and pilots

A number of trials and pilots are ongoing. These are being carried out in preparation for when large volumes of data are accessioned to the Digital Archive.

Open Source Software Pilot

Open Source Software (OSS) is software whose source code is openly published. It is usually developed through voluntary efforts, and is made available to the public at no cost under a licence that prevents it being commercially redistributed. OSS has leapt to prominence by starting to command a significant share of the software services market. QinetiQ have estimated that "within five years, 50% of the volume of the software infrastructure market could be taken by OSS". See QinetiQs' website for more details in Analysis of the Impact of Open Source Software.

OSS solutions offer many potential benefits to government departments: they use open standards that allow for interoperability between systems, they are often cheaper, and they are considered to be more resistant to crashes, bugs and viruses. With these factors in mind, the government has formulated an Open Source Software Policy. This states that the government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in all future IT procurements.

To assess the benefits to digital preservation offered by using open source software, and to uncover any possible difficulties, we are testing a range of open source products such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and the Open Office suite.

This page contains Microsoft Word files. See plug-ins and file formats for help in accessing these file types.