Enterprise Europe, Brussels, 20 October 2003 - Practical guidelines on how to migrate public information technology (IT) infrastructure, such as office applications, calendar and e-mail, from proprietary to open-source software (OSS) have been posted on the web pages of the European Commission's Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA) Programme.

The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide detailed recommendations on how to migrate to OSS-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications. They have been developed with guidance from public sector IT experts from Denmark, Germany, Spain, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Turkey.

Plans to switch public IT infrastructure to OSS have recently been announced or implemented in Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom, but many IT managers are still unsure how to manage the transition. These guidelines explain how to plan for migration and which solutions will work.