Abstract
As of March 2019, CERN is no longer eligible for academic licences of Microsoft products. For this reason, CERN IT started a series of task forces to respond to the evolving requirements of the user community with the goal of reducing as much as possible the need for Microsoft licensed software. This exercise was an opportunity to understand better the user requirements for different types of applications. Here we focus on MS Project, the dominant PCbased project management software, which has been used at CERN for many years. There were over 1,500 installations at CERN when the task force started, with a heterogeneous pool of users in terms of required functionality, area of work and expertise. This paper will present an evaluation of users’ needs and whether they could be fulfilled with cheaper and less advanced solutions for project management and scheduling. Moreover, selected alternatives, their deployment and lessons learned will be described in more detail. Finally, it will present the approach on how to communicate, train and migrate users to the proposed solutions.
Highlights
As of March 2019, CERN is no longer eligible for academic licences of Microsoft products
Since 2018, CERN’s Information Technology Department has started a set of internal task forces, the so called MALT project, to understand better what other alternatives are available on the market for all the existing Microsoft applications used at CERN
This means that any alternative tool should provide at least those features to satisfy most of the users’ needs. 1/3 of the users would be considered as advanced users, which means they required some advanced features, which may eventually justify to continue using MS Project
Summary
As of March 2019, CERN is no longer eligible for academic licences of Microsoft products. Since 2018, CERN’s Information Technology Department has started a set of internal task forces, the so called MALT project, to understand better what other alternatives are available on the market for all the existing Microsoft applications used at CERN. The change of licence model has presented an opportunity to review the existing policies and recommendations for many applications. Microsoft applications have been openly available to CERN users for the past years without any restrictions.
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