Three IT staffers of the Province of Luxembourg in Belgium are implementing their own telephone system, having learned the ropes from an open source telephony firm. The Province is freeing itself of vendor lock-in, replacing its proprietary telephone system with Linux-based Asterisk telephone services.

18 Directorate-Generals of the European Commission, Executive Agencies and Institutions recently replaced the paper invoicing process by electronic means, namely e-PRIOR. The change was implemented in the invoicing process with two of DIGIT’s major IT market procedures’ contractors, procurers of the ESP DESIS II and ITSS II procedures. 

Tests performed in April 2012 showed that DIGIT and Difi were able to seamlessly exchange electronic invoices without any need of adapting their information systems. Interoperability was the result of the adoption of Open Standards and the creation of implicit agreements, which work across borders, at organisational, semantic and technical levels.

Politicians and City Council members of the city of Bern formed, on 26 April 2012, a group for Digital Sustainability that advocates the city's IT Department independence from of IT vendors and the introduction of solutions of long term sustainability.

Several organisations in favour of open standards, free and open source software believe that the Government of the United Kingdom should quickly start implementing its open standards policy. They insist that the Government must leverage truly open innovative technologies to achieve long term savings.

Following a related ministerial decision in December 2011, the Hungarian public administration, as of April 2012, was to use open document standards for all electronic documents; all public organisations were also encouraged to move to open source office tools.

All Portuguese public administrations must consider using open source for their office suites, email, web sites, document management and IT system management. Increasing this type of software is part of a major IT overhaul that was made public on 21 March 2012.

As reported by its Vice-Mayor Petr Chramosta during an Open Source Software Usage by European Public Administration (OSEPA) workshop on 26 March 2012, the Czech municipality of Grygov uses open source almost in all its activities.

According to figures provided in a Council Bulletin on 19 March 2012 by the Mayor of Munich, Christian Ude, switching to a vendor independent desktop based on open source reduces costs and results in fewer calls to help desks.

The Asset Description Metadata Schema (ADMS) version 1.00 is available for download on Joinup since 18 April 2012, released under the ISA Open Metadata Licence v1.1.

A legal requirement to support multiple document formats, including the open document format, is the main reason for which the Staff at Denmark's Ministry of Transport intends to move, in the near future, to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office tools.

A legal requirement to support multiple document formats, including the open document format, is the main reason for which the Staff at Denmark's Ministry of Transport intends to move, in the near future, to LibreOffice, a free and open source suite of office tools.

The city council of Limerick, Ireland's third largest city, is making more and more use of free and open source in order to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in. It began three years ago by switching to the free and open source suite of office tools LibreOffice, replacing a proprietary office suite.