Fitzgerald (2009) notes that there is a lack of research on OSS adoption in organizations. Fitzgerald (ibid.) also notes that the widespread media coverage of open source leads to high awareness of the concept, but there is still a lack of any tried and tested approach which could guarantee successful implementation of open source adoption. In Section 1.3, the overall need to increase the awareness of OSS solutions and the demand for practical OSS implementation and evaluation experiences in the organizational context was expressed.

It also looks like they were badgered into keeping Windows, which is a huge mistake, and there was a lot of delay. Swapping Microsoft Office for Open Office might save some money but it leaves everyone with a second rate desktop that Microsoft will continually sabotage. By 2003, free software desktops were considerably better than Windows for most home and office work. The 2006 IBM report recognizes this and has some good advice about how to get there.

Thanks for the case study. It will be an interesting, if depressing read. I agree that management support is required, so get them on early by migrating them when Windows fails again.

My advice to moving to free software is to do it quickly when forced by a part of the Microsoft upgrade train or hardware replacement. Hit low hanging fruit first and isolate trouble makers by ignoring them. Move services, like email and web behind the scenes. Move easy clerical workers and do pilot migrations with enthusiastic power users. Clerical workers are the bulk of any organization and moving these will have the greatest cost impact for the least investment. Ignore hostile power users and leave them with their Microsoft tools but don’t bother with Vista/Windows 7 and other new Microsoft garbage that won’t work with your free software workstations. This costs nothing as long as these systems are adequately firewalled and unable to disrupt everyone else’s work when Windows is compromised. Don’t butt heads, spend your time providing services that work. Don’t let the Microsoft people waste your time with studdies and other stuff they don’t really do themselves either. Microsoft is always moving the goal posts, so the more time you give them the higher your costs will be. When you have most of the organization moved, you can virtualize what’s left of your Windows dependencies and serve that out to the last holdouts as you eliminate the last Windows fat clients.

http://acta.uta.fi/teos.php?id=11357

“Lataa pdf” = download as pdf, http://acta.uta.fi/haekokoversio.php?id=11357

Karjalainen Martti:
Large-scale migration to an open source office suite: An innovation adoption study in Finland

Summary is in finnish but the thesis itself mainly in english.
Lots of fascinating details, including the usual tricks that Microsoft tried to play.

Small mentions also in here:
http://old.nabble.com/-Fwd%3A-Academic-dissertation-about-OpenOffice.org–td29760905.html

> “This study investigates the largest transition in Finland to an open
> source office suite and to an open standard for office documents. The IT
> environment of the open source OpenOffice.org migration involves more
> than 10 000 workstations in the Finnish Ministry of Justice and its
> administrative sector.”

Of news sites only tietokone (“computer” in finnish) reported it:
http://www.tietokone.fi/uutiset/microsoft_painosti_ministeriota_openoffice_hankkeessa

Title: Microsoft pressured ministry (of justice) in openoffice project

Other news outlets, mainstream news, newpapers were completely silent about this.
Maybe it gets attention after the dissertation which is on October 15th.