City of Mannheim to OpenOffice on Windows

"We want to decide our IT strategy in Mannheim and not have Microsoft make the decision for Mannheim,"

...declares Gerd Armbruster, the IT infrastructure manager at the German city.

3,500 users

"We migrated from Microsoft Exchange Server 2005 to Oracle Collaboration Suite because it [OCS] supports open standards — it is proprietary software but it uses standard protocols,"

...says Armbruster, talking to ZDNet UK about his plans.

This is a pattern that is being repeated, the World over.