Peterborough City Council wants to drop 'expensive' Microsoft for open source and collaborative tools

'We've looked at applications like Word and Excel and actually find that most people in the council use them very rarely nowadays,' Richard Godfrey, ICT, strategy, infrastructure and programme manager tells Computing

Peterborough City Council is looking to drop Microsoft and its "expensive" user agreements in favour of other, more open source applications and collaborative tools.

That's what Richard Godfrey, ICT, strategy, infrastructure and programme manager for Peterborough Council, revealed to Computing in a recent interview.

In a bid to cut costs and boost efficiency in the face of government austerity measures, the council is moving much of its IT infrastructure into the Amazon Web Services cloud, as part of an IT transformation that could also see the council ditch Microsoft applications.

"We're looking at moving to things like Google Docs and moving away from the traditional Microsoft Office," he said.

"For me it's about giving the member of staff the right tool to do their job. So it's not just if you're a senior manager you get an iPad, it's whether your job requires an iPad or other type of tablet, Chromebook or iPhone or whatever device it is, that's the device you'll get to do your job," he explained.

Godfrey said analysis had shown that many users rarely used Office apps, making them an expensive luxury.

"One of the main drivers is cost. Our enterprise agreement with Microsoft is hugely expensive and it's expensive to maintain especially when you've got a big exchange environment," he said.

"We've looked at applications like Word and Excel and actually find that most people in the council use them very rarely nowadays," Godfrey added.

"Accounts uses Excel, but in general, most people are just putting figures into columns and adding them up or maybe getting as far as the Pivot Table but not getting any further," he continued.

"We're actually using a very small percentage of what Excel can do, so we're spending a lot on giving you one of the best products, but do you need that? And for some people it might be they just need Open Office or another open-source suite," Godfrey said.

"And if we move towards where we want to go where all our cabinet papers become a web form, you can almost drop Microsoft Word anyway," he added.

Godfrey also suggested that Peterborough City Council might also drop email in favour of a collaboration tool, which could be Box or something like the recently announced Facebook at Work.

"We want to move away from email in general; we sent far too many emails and copy too many people into emails. No one outside of work really sends email anymore, you use chat and messenger to communicate," he said.

"Facebook have just announced they've got Facebook At Work and we'll look at whether that's something we'll want to look at in the future," Godfrey continued.

Ultimately, he explained, he wants Peterborough City Council staff to be able to use tools in a way that is more in tune with how they use social media and messenger tools outside of work.

"What we want to do is move towards using tools that staff use in their own time outside of work, so reducing the need for training," Godfrey told Computing.

"So we're trying to promote things like Evernote in that they're intuitive and relatively easy to use, even if you've never done it before. It's not a week-long training course to use Box, it's 30 minutes," he concluded.