The Mayor of the City of Munich, Christian Ude has already been using the test version for some time, and has taken a positive summary of his experiences: “Nach notwendigen Konzept- und Entwicklungsphasen beginnt jetzt der Effektiveinsatz mit einer Version, die sich im Piloteinsatz nicht zuletzt bei mir bewährt hat. Der Basisclient ist für München ein Schritt zu mehr Unabhängigkeit von einzelnen Herstellern und freie Software zeigt sich hier als ein probates Mittel dafür. Für den normalen Anwender ändert sich dabei wenig.” (rough translation: After concept and development time, we now started to use a version that was successfull tested also by me. The software is step to more independence from single vendors, and free software is a good tool for that. The normal user is not really affected much by the change.)

The configuration is based on Linux Distribution Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, the KDE 3.5 user interface and OpenOffice 2.

The Limux team has established guidelines to help overcome format conversion issues between Microsoft and open source products, according to Schiessl. “With OpenOffice, we don’t have a problem opening and reading Microsoft formats and, with most simple documents, we don’t have any processing problems,” he said. “But, in some cases, there can be format loss, and some documents need to be handled in a special way to avoid format conversion problems. Our guidelines address these issues.”