Yamagata Shimbun on Oct. 30th (
web version on Oct. 31st) reported, "It was revealed on Oct. 29th that Yamagata prefectural government decided on a plan to adopt OpenOffice.org as next PC office software for fiscal 2011 due to the fact that support for MS Office XP will end in July, 2011."
They have about 2,600 Office XP insatalled PCs. If they want to upgrade them to new version, it costs 30,000 - 32,000 yen per PC. They also have Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, which would have to be upgraded. It would cost a lot.
They have a total of about 5,600 PCs in their government office and local agencies. All these PCs will get OpenOffice.org installed.
OpenOffice.org will completely replace MS Office in July 2011.
Yamagata prefectural government will be the first prefecutral government adopting OpenOffice.org among
47 prefectural governments in Japan.