Saw this just now: http://www.osor.eu/news/es-zaragozas-move-to-complete-open-source-desktop-go... "Zaragoza's move to complete open source desktop going to plan by Gijs Hillenius — published on Jun 08, 2010 The move by the city of Zaragoza to an open source desktop is making good progress. All of the city's civil servants now use open source tools including Thunderbird, VLC, Firefox and OpenOffice. And this year some seven hundred of the city's 2800 desktop PCs will have seen their proprietary operating system replaced by the Linux open source alternative. ... "It is not possible to move all applications to the open source platform. For example tools for Computer Aided Design and Optical Character Recognition, can't be replaced by open source alternatives. But proprietary and open source software can live together. And if we really can't find an open source option, we resort to Virtualbox and Wine to provide users their proprietary application." ...
Their web site does mention a bit about wine, too: http://zaragozaciudad.net/azlinux/2009/septiembre.php (autotranslated):
"24/09/2009 How we use WINE ... Microsoft Access: Access we have hundreds of applications that lack of time and means we can not migrate to an Open Source environment. WINE can emulate many of them even though the code should be reviewed, compiled and compacted again. A particular case is still unresolved are the Access applications that generate a mail merge with Word documents.
OCR: for now we have not found an efficient alternative to the use of OCR software that "emulate" Windows OCR software with WINE
Transactional environment: the client for our transactional environment is old and only works for Windows environments so that the use of WINE has been indispensable
In contrast we must also say that some applications could not be emulated with WINE as Presto or Nokia PC Suite. So far WINE has not been useful to emulate CAD applications.
In conclusion we can say that WINE is a useful tool in some cases and allows us to move forward in the migration to Open Source environment as alternatives to proprietary software are available and the height of these."
Hmm, I wonder what "Presto" is, and which CAD suites they use. - Dan