City of Munich IT head rejects need for City to return to Windows

Everything's working just fine, claims IT@M's Karl-Heinz Schneider

Karl-Heinz Schneider, the head of IT at the City of Munich's IT services provider IT@M, the company behind the City's desktop Linux implementation, has claimed that there are no "compelling technical reasons" for the authority to order a migration back to Windows.

Speaking to German IT publication Heise.de, Schneider claimed that he was surprised by the move, adding that any compatibility problems that the City had encountered had been fixed.

IT@M had developed LiMux, a distribution of Linux for the local authority based on Ubuntu and rolled it out to 20,000 workstations across the organisation. However, following a review by services giant Accenture, politicians at the City of Munich ordered a return to Windows by 2020.

The report suggest that running Linux was proving more costly than expected and "The Linux client and the LibreOffice open-source office package, which was used in parallel, also caused compatibility problems, and many municipal computers, systems and workflows did not run smoothly".

He continued: "We do not see any compelling technical reasons for a change to Windows and Microsoft Office," Schneider said. "We solve compatibility and interoperability problems by providing MS Office, mostly virtualised, at workplaces that need to work together with external offices on office documents."

Systems failures at the District Administration Board in recent years, added Schneider, were nothing to do with the Linux implementation.

Accenture had claimed that running a mixed environment - to accommodate those users who could not do without Microsoft Office or other Microsoft-only applications - would be more costly than running an all-Microsoft environment.

However, Schneider claimed that the decision had been political, "not made on the basis of facts", with even Accenture recommending the continued use of LibreOffice, he claimed, as the office applications standard across the City of Munich, as the Open Document Format standard has been integrated into the local authority's specialists applications, according to Schneider.