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Petrobras deploys OpenOffice.org in 90 thousands desktops
Starting March 9th 2010, Petrobras – Petroleo Brasileiro SA, a 123 Billion oil and gas corporation - initiated the deployment of BrOffice.org (or OpenOffice.org in Brazil) in all its desktops,estimated up to 90.000 machines. The deployment of the open sourcesoftware, that can be downloaded and used freely by end users and corporations, should be concluded in two months.
At the end of this period, the new software will be used by 100 thousands employees and collaborators, that will be trained to adopt the new office productivity suite. Petrobras estimates a reduction above 40% of the internal demand for closed, fee based equivalent proprietary software.
In order to allow the new software to be rapidly absorbed by the users,the project was divided into three phases, as stated by Gil Brasileiro, project leader. In the current phase, the deployment is done silently and the users informed on the new office suite. In the second phase, there will be a awareness campaign to stimulate the use of BrOffice.org, together with a new computer based training, developed specifically for the oil and gas industry. In the last phase, there will be a license adjustment program, in which each sector of the company will evaluate the real need to keep the proprietary suite and will be charged per-seat accordingly.
“One of the strategies for the license adjustment is that from a giventime in near future, there will be no more update of the proprietary software, only BrOffice.org”, explains Gil Brasileiro. If there is the need for the other tool, the manager of the division will have to justify the business need and it will be charged accordingly. In order to assemble the computer based training, Petrobras asked for help of the consultants of the Brazilian OpenOffice.org NGO. “We asked them to help us to map and address the biggest issues with end-users”, Gil tells us.
In the preparation of the migration project, the Petrobras team met several IT managers of other companies that leaded their own migration projects, like São Paulo Underground, Banco do Brasil, Itaipu Binacional and SERPRO. Together with BrOffice.org, Petrobras also deployed the open source browser Firefox. These two experiences with open source software are new to Petrobras with respect to the desktops. In many servers, the company already uses GNU/Linux.