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Migrating Your Office from Windows to Linux?
bastiji asks: "I work at a mid-sized company, around 50 people and 90% M$ shop (10% being the Sun server doing our backups). Most of my users are using Office 85% of the time with some specialized apps thrown in for good measure. With the upcoming licensing changes from M$ my finance guys are worried about increased spending on even the software that we already own. I've been to told to look for alternatives and I'm asking for your help. How does one begin to do migration from a totally dependent M$ shop to the least expensive options. Are there any examples for mid-sized firms taking this route and any public examples of cost-savings?"
I expect that like Linux at ISPs this is sneaking up on everyone, but may be difficult to find companies publicly willing to risk Microsoft wrath by being open about it.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
Give the techies the linux boxes and the business guys keep windows. Always keep window's boxes, cause customers will always send documents and reports in some microsoft format, so make it available.
Plus, changing business guys over to linux is no easy task.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Don't upgrade. Office 97/2000 will work fine for the next few years. At that time, your financial circumstances may be different or Linux may have even closed the gap some more making it a more viable alternative. Who knows, maybe a miracle will happen and M$ will develop Office for Linux (who's laughing now?)
Are you looking to get away from M$ entirely, or just Office because of its hideous licensing scheme?
You're in for a real treat if you're going to try and get an alternative OS going in an environment that's not filled with techies....most of these people took years just to "learn" Windows, Linux (or whatever) is going to be a nightmare for them.
Maybe you should just look into a different office suite.
As a side note, it really bites my ass that M$ is trying to leverage companies into paying more money because of the fear of having to switch to new apps that possibly might be incompatible with other companies' documents. Yet another reason proprietary technology sucks. There needs to be an industry-wide switch to open document formats....RTF and whatever the spreadsheet and presentation software equivalents might be.
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Plan a slow transition. Microsoft is going to hit you with a deadline to buy into their subscription system. The deadline is that if you don't buy in by then, you have to pay full price for upgrades in the future. But you can ignore that since you'll be transitioning away from Microsoft instead of upgrading.
If you're lucky, your custom apps will run with Wine or can even be compiled with winelib to be native on Linux, even if they are a pain to port to real Linux apps.
If you find you can't effectively transition your apps, you can stick with Windows, but drop Office in favor of Star/Open Office. Even if you get stuck paying more for OS licensing, you'll save a huge bundle on the other licenses. If you do that, just be sure you're very careful with not letting unlicensed copies of MS Office onto your systems, or you'll be in big trouble if a BSA audit comes along.
The company I work for will be converting the entire backend to Sun Microsystems machines. While working with the Sun engineers I asked about alternatives to M$ as well, and it turns out that moving off M$ to a Sun thin client was easier than I had expected. We have 110 users and may look at using the Sun iplanet app server to administer our in house apps through an intranet portal to the desktop.
The sum of our knowledge today becomes the reference point of our ignorance tomorrow.
... is the hard and brutal way. Buy some easy Linux distros (Mandrake or perhaps RedHat) then send all employees away to learn about using Linux. If they are depending on the haunting .doc format run Office through Wine. The special windows software should either be run through Wine or in an emulator such as VMware (although this would require a separate Windows license.) Get some geeks/gurus to work on making Wine working near perfect.
Whatever you chose professional training and a support deal with the distro manufacturer.
Look a monkey!
I have been using it and it is simply great. Absolutely better than StarOffice and a fraction of the MS Office cost.
From the article
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
I work for a medium sized (~40) company and we are no longer MS dominated.
Disclosure: we are an engineering company, so we have been doing some things on UNIX for a long time.
Having said that, our current mix is around 85% non-MS and 15% MS. For our engineering tasks, we use software that never did come from MS (although it was supported on the Windows platform, even though we never used it on Windows). For most of our "office" tasks, we use StarOffice 5.2 and will be moving to 6.0. All of this is now running on Linux based PCs.
The 15% MS portion is mainly for certain cases where we must use the same tool as our customer, and the customer want's to use MS tools (mostly spec. and project management related).
All-in-all, it works pretty well, and it definitely shaves $$ off your overhead costs, not to mention reduced audit worries.
Before you go all crazy, at least try a Mac running OS X, first. If you like it enough, you'll have the best of both worlds: Soft chewy desktop supported by a name-brand computer maker, with a crunchy Unix backbone.
You may never have considered a Mac before, but you might like it now--it's worth at least a look.
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$tar -xvf
I just know this will get modded down to minus 1000, but I can't resist:
For over a year or so I'm thinking of moving from Linux to windows. Why? Because of the stability and usability. Windows 2000 and XP appear to be very stable and no one can deny that they are lightyears ahead of anything on linux when it comes to desktop comfort.
For the last couple of months I've noticed an increasing amount of posts on Slashdot from people subtly promoting Microsoft and putting down Linux. They say just the right things to make sure their posts don't get modded down, but essentially try to persuade people to think the types of things Microsoft wants them to think.
Here's a very interesting article from the UK Guardian about corporations using fake people on newsgroups and email forums to rubbish their opponents. They use companies who promise to be very discrete and do it in such a way that it is very difficult to link the individuals back to the company concerned. The article cites the case of this type of tactics being used by Monsanto. Is it really so difficult to believe that Microsoft might pay one of these companies to post anti-Linux comments on sites like Slashdot? Read the article.
I would install as many alternatives as you can, and make them the default. Open a doc in staroffice, and things should work. You can get at word, but not without going through a wrapper that requires you to email what staroffice cannot do that you need. Users will try to use staroffice where they can, where it fails they will tell you what doesn't work.
Or to save even more money, just start migrating people to linux/kde/koffice, after verifying that their applications will work.
Remember, you are a company, you have work to get done. Find out what tasks you really need to do, and then find a linux program to do it. For those who only use a few features of Word this is easy, koffice is there already. For those who need something complex, you might need wine, or devolpe your own solution.
Do not forget to do some practice runs. Take your backups, restore them to a equivelent systems, and convert that system to linux with the old data, and run some fake transactions. (be careful not to get this data into the real world). And don't convert anyone before a major deadline. Accounting gets converted right after payday, and nowhere near april 15th!
You don't have a hurry now, if the BSA does come knocking, or Microsoft does start demanding unreasonable fees, you have a plan in place to convert quickly, otherwise just convert as an open source alteranative is just as good as the windows equivelent. (Note, I said just as good for your pruposes, and Not as good. If you never use some feature, then there is no reason to wait for it)
I changed one full department and may spread the change further by using the BSA's scare tactics and their current advertising campain. My boss heard one of their ad's that say "We'll fine you 100,000 dollars per incident, which can add up to millions!" and asked if we are compliant.... I honestly answered, that if a sane person did the audit, yes. but by BSA standards... no, and if we are ever audited they will leave with a fine on us even if we were 100% perfect... it's just like OSHA, they never leave without issuing a violation. I also informed him that cince the employees are allowed to take their laptops home there can be upwards of 20 violations per computer as we have no control over what the employees do at home or outside the building... I can wipe all the laptops, but then the salespeople will whine again..
he then asked me if there was another solution, and I wipped out my Redhat 7.3 laptop with open office..
Guess what... we're gonna switch to NON-MS.. all thanks to the BSA.
so basically... Use Microsoft's and the BSA's tactics to your advantage... push the fear,loathing and threats they are pushing... keep mentioning the 100,000 dollar fine PER incident. that the companies sensitive data will be accessable by strangers during the BSA visit, and the business disruption and public notification by the BSA that XYZ company STEALS.
works great..... Thanks Microsoft and the BSA for the BEST tools a Linux Advocate could ever want.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
At this point, you're going to have to invest a substantial amount in retraining, regardless of what you do, because different versions of windows don't work the same way. In '95 I switched from windows 3.1 to Linux. It took me some time to get used to Linux. But everything I learned at that point still works.
With my knowledge of Windows 3.1, I couldn't figure out anything at all about Windows 95, let alone anything more recent. Had I taken the time to learn Windows 95, I would have had little advantage in learning 2K, let alone XP. Furthermore, there's so much fragmentation in windows software that, when I was using Word at one point, experienced people using the same version on a different computer couldn't explain how to do things.
Cost of retraining is a significant factor, and you shouldn't do it until you have to. But sticking with MicroSoft doesn't reduce the cost, and it means that you'll get hit with it again in 2-3 years.
I have done all my banking on my linux box using mozilla for quite some time now. Works great. And there are none of those infuriating bandwidth hogging ads to deal with either.