Slashdot Mirror
Can Windows, OS X and Fedora All Work Together?
greymond writes "In my ever growing job responsibilities, I've recently been tasked with documenting our organization's IT infrastructure, primarily focusing on cost analysis of our hardware leases and software purchases. This is something that has never been done in our organization before and while it's moving along slowly, I'm already seeing some places where we could make improvements. Once completed, I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail. However, this would result in three departments each running a different system: Windows, OS X, and most likely Fedora. Has anyone worked in or tried to set up an environment like this? What roadblocks did you run into? Is this really feasible or should I just continue to focus on the cutbacks that don't require OS changes? (The requirement for having three different systems is that the vast majority of our administration, who rely solely on an install of Microsoft Windows, Word and Excel, are savvy enough that if they came in and saw Gnome running on Fedora with Open Office they'd pick it up fast. However, our marketing department is composed entirely of Apple systems, and the latest Adobe Creative Suite doesn't seem to all work under Wine. The biggest issue is with the Sales department though, as they rely on a proprietary sales platform that is Windows only — and generally, sales personal give the biggest push back when it comes to organizational changes.)"
Why do you want to get rid of Exchange for GMail? What has it not been doing for you? I'm at a small company, and we have Macs, Windows and Fedora desktops. The only changes we've made was removing Office for Mac and replacing it with Mail.app on the Macs and using OpenOffice on the Macs and Linux desktops.
All tied together with the an Active Directory on Server 2003 and an Exchange server.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The question is: Can people work together as a whole toward a single goal? Exhibit A: Our current government system(unadulterated pessimism) Exhibit B: The great wall of China So I think the answer is yes, if there is a Overlord with substantial credibility threatening all the subordinates with death and destruction.
[1] Glossary:
Boni: plural of Bonus.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
i recently hired an IT staff that outsources their job responsibilities to online chat message boards. has anyone else had experience in replacing such a staff?
Yes.
I am at a university, and my department's IT guys have to deal with Windows, Mac OS X, Fedora, Ubuntu, and even a few old Solaris machines. They maintain a wiki of tips for accomplishing various tasks, and for the most part, users who do not use the default configuration (dual-boot Windows and Ubuntu) are on their own. The biggest issues are probably the file servers (NFS is only allowed for the default Ubuntu install, Samba for everything else) and printing (maintaining both Windows and Unix print queues is apparently difficult). Of course, we do not really have "Enterprise" IT needs; strictly speaking, we do not even need domain logins, except for a few servers, and machines can be registered on a per-owner basis (unregistered MAC addresses do not get IPs); security requirements are not very high, a firewall that blocks everything but SSH is enough, for the most part.
Palm trees and 8
No.
If it works, don't fix it. While you do pay more for windows licenses, you pay a lot less for IT support staff since everyone and their grandmother knows windows. You'll also have training time and an increase in support calls from employees who don't know linux. Some employees will actually make an effort to not learn linux because they are comfortable with windows and don't like change.
You also need to consider the risk of moving your mail and collaboration off the local network onto the web. When you do that, you no longer can control uptime.
First off, I really don't think you want to deploy Fedora in an office environment. It's unstable, has a short support life and is not well suited to end-users. If you're a Red Hat type of person, I'd recommend trying CentOS or Scientific Linux. Much longer life spans, much more stable and still free.
Otherwise, get one or two users from each department to test-run the new OS you put in front of them. It's all well and good for you to say, "We can replace A with B and it can do the same job," but your end-users will always find cases where A and B are not compatible or one lacks the features of another. So make sure at least one user in each department tries your new solution before you plan to roll it out to anyone else.
What is Windows 7 failing to do for you that Linux will improve upon without causing problems in different areas? I find it hard to believe that a business that already paid for Windows 7 is making a smart business decision by dropping it in favor of Linux (or even Mac OS X).
Changing to Linux because you can is just stupid. Good luck following through with your "savvy" users actually using Linux on a daily basis without a lot of trouble. You're going to need it...
You can laugh all you want. But unless you have a reason why one should not, I would consider you a troll!
Post pictures of your girlfriend, and we'll tell you if you should propose. Give a snapshot of your kitchen, and we'll make redecorating suggestions. Post your eTrade login and password, I'll take a shot at helping you revise your portfolio. Thinking of buying a house?
We know nothing about your company, what it does, what the people are like. We have no fucking clue what you should do, because every situation is different. If there is one decent bit of advice to be had, and this comes from the Veep level with 20 years in:
1. Everything starts with the directory system and
2. Calendaring derives from it.
With Windows Office 2010, I believe it now supports .odt files, so OpenOffice/Libre Office and Windows Office can share. The Mac's with Office 2008 cannot read odt files, but you can get OpenOffice/Libre Office for them.
On the email front, I think there is a very good email program for Linux that will talk to exchange, but most exchange servers do IMAP anyway, so that shouldn't be a problem to keep Exchange around for email purposes. A couple of plugin's for Thunderbird and it can handle the exchange calendering features as well. Thunderbird also talks to Google Calendar so either email/calender system.
It will be interesting to see what changes are coming to Ubuntu. Today I would recommend it over Fedora or CentOS for desktop use, but they are changing how the GUI works and that could either be a great thing or a really bad thing.
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
As your responsibilities level up, so should your strategic view of the world in your organisation. Learn to factor in the less tangible costs of large-scale swapouts such as re-training initiatives, and the costs of the human factors (speaking to your users broadly is in my opinion, going to show you that they likely won't pick up the change well at all, try to figure out what you'd spend to fix that, and what runway you'd lose as a result). Understand whether "Exchange to Gmail?" is the right question to ask, or if "Our servers and people (and all our capital budget), to their servers and people (and our monthly, now operational budget)" is the right question. You can get into whether or not Gmail is good enough technically when you have that answer, and I'd encourage you to learn from and discuss with your peers - IT leaders of other businesses. And finally, this wouldn't be an organizational change. This would be a change to how IT delivers services to existing org units, how those are paid for, and who pays them. Ultimately Sales in a lot of companies is the linkage between you and customers, between costs and revenues. You won't beat them into submission, you'll have to sell them something better (well, in my experience that's easier).
See Serving Apples, http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/01/17/serving-apples-integrating-mac-os-x-clients-into-a-fedora-network/, for a description of one technique to integrate Mac OS X and Linux authorization, authentication and file sharing.
It depends. If he encrypts EVERYTHING that goes to gmail servers, then moving away from Exchange makes perfect sense.
Sounds like Windows ticks all the boxes for the stuff you want to do. Why don't you try going to Windows instead?
The OSs can, but can you make the people play nice, probably not.
Have the legal department read the full license agreement(s) for GMail.
Not much experience with Linux eh,
well don't tell the boss you can support it if you really can't,
unless your budget wants to get blown out hiring gurus.
and there goes your pay rise and flash job title
( which is all you really want by the sound of it )
upstart
Go well
If you're looking to simplify your IT architecture, you should consider cutting out Fedora. Marketing requires Windows or Mac, sales requires Windows, and nobody requires Linux.
When was the last time Gmail was taken down by a virus? Or a power outage? Or a hardware failure?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Lets break this down: "I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail" -Why? Most users are not comfortable with anything other than Windows. Second Windows 7 is still somewhat fresh, I mean, your going to depreciate software that you likely purchased less than 6 months to a year old? Sounds like an immediate waste of money rather than a long term savings. The Second part of your question makes it seem like your some dumbass fresh out of college. Really? GMail over Exchange? Are you willing to hedge your business needs on a free email service, not to mention the loss of collaboration options, etc? All in all it sounds like this situation: 1) You're a Junior Administrator or Helpdesk Engineer 2) They fired the ACTUAL IT Staff and left you since you are cheap enough to keep on the books. Look, want to save money? Look into Virtualization Options, Open Office instead of Microsoft. Linux is not the end all at the workstation level, no matter what they tell you in college.
Just depends on how integrated you want everything. If you're going for basic functionality with no authentication or file sharing, they all work great.
Assuming you have an AD install, all your clients mentioned like at least LDAP for authentication, some even do well with AD. All of them have NFS capabilities. You DID pay for the Ultra-Mega-Windows, right? It has an NFS client built in, and all of those clients love CIFS and CUPS.
I would have to thoroughly recommend against Fedora for a business environment. CentOS makes a great workstation as well as a great server. In my experience, Fedora is great for the hobbyist, and for admins who feel like they really want to prove Linux can do something.
You can get @company-name addresses using gmail. Have used such an email at a company in the past. It is not a free account, but it is cheap for what you get.
You can use gmail and have custom domain .. I would take gmail over Exchange in a heartbeat.
Just make sure the right tools are defined for the right jobs, and the scope of using them are clearly defined. By defining how things are supported, it makes it clear when people go off reservation, they are responsible for their own support and that policy dictates that changing existing systems will not include those "off the reservation" items are not considered.
Then you BOFH all "off the reservation" systems by purposely choosing upgrades and updates that break them .
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
When was the last time Gmail was taken down by a virus? Or a power outage? Or a hardware failure?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/160153/gmail_outage_marks_sixth_downtime_in_eight_months.html
This all depends on the size of your network and number of each type of system deployed. Plus don't forget there are political reasons for making or not making certain recommendations that generally outweigh any technical/economic reasons. I have seen people fired for making recommendations that had less exposure than what you have suggested.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Virus, power outage, or hardware failure? Not sure. Unexpected outages? Well, at the very least, 2009. I'm sure there have been at least local outages in 2010, too.
They're probably talking about using Google Apps - which gives you access to most google services (mail calender, docs), with user@yourdomain.com
Want your users to use Open Office instead? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them.
Want your users to use Linux instead? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them.
If it hasn't already happened, repeat until your 'savings' have disappeared and you've been fired.
Not the way things should be. But we're talking about the way things are in 90% of companies.
This is a stupid idea and you're stupid for considering it.
Not posting Anonymously.
I would really think twice about forcing someone whose job _relies_ on Excel or Powerpoint to migrate to OpenOffice if you have such people.
I run Linux on my desktop and use OpenOffice on a regular basis. While it's good enough for demos and _most_ spreadsheeting tasks, it is NOT Excel and I find myself running Excel in a WIndows Virtual Machine whenever I have to do anything that involves juggling/formatting data which isn't intensive or routine enough to warrant its own PERL/Python script.
Before you mod me down: I love the idea of OpenOffice, and that it exists. However, if you're messing with people's everyday productivity tools, I'd definitely give them a trial period with OO's windows version or something. I hear good things about Crossover for Office, but have not used it myself.
There's no serious replacement for PowerPoint on Linux at this point in time if you exchange these files with other people or rely on giving looking presentations which have some complexity. I can _always_ tell free slideware during a presentation and unless you're Richard Stallman it makes your organization look a bit cheap.
I'll give you a perfectly valid reason: your corporate email should never live on servers outside your control.
Now the fun part starts: how much would it cost your company to make your mail service as reliable as Gmail? And from the fine article posted by the AC above:
It may sound bad, but Gmail does appear to have a reasonable amount of uptime, all considered. Following last fall's series of outages, a Google rep told the IDG News Service that Gmail suffers only about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, giving it an average uptime rate of 99.9 percent. He noted that, according to some independent reports, on-premise e-mail systems tend to see twice the amount of offline time--anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, on average, every 30 days.
Is Gmail for everyone? No, but it certainly is worth looking at for some companies.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Management do not want big changes. They want quick wins. Find somewhere that can show savings fast. If you find several, keep some for next years savings. And sometimes management lose attention to the issue, so talking is enough. Then you can use the same savings next year. Especially if management change. Hell, we presented decommissioning the same server 3 times to various management. Happy managers all the way!
And whatever you du: Do NOT propose anything that require more work. You will not get more staff. You will not get more time to do it. In the end you will be the one paying for the savings.
For maximum simplicity just move everyone to OS X. The guys who need Office can use MS Office for the Mac. The non-technical users won't be freaked out by OS X in the way they might be by Linux. OS X gives you most of the same malware immunity you get with any other non-Windows OS. The marketing and graphics guys get to keep using Macs just like they always have. Your developers, if there are any, should be fine on the Mac unless they're doing development that specifically targets Windows.
From a cost perspective, of course, this may not be the cheapest thing in the world. But you can't beat it for simplicity. I also like the branded Gmail suggestion. That can work irrespective of which OS's you deploy.
Sorry mate, but some of the advice you give is rubbish:
- "more professional to have a @companyname e-mail over @gmail."
You do know you can use google apps for your own domain, right?
- "I don't know if you are currently using or plan to use active directory"
You do know that Active Directory is a requirement for Exchange, right?
http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
This kind of change really requires a much wider consultation, and probably more skills than you have developed.
First, you haven't made a case for the changes you propose. Not an "I like Linux - Windows is evil" case, but a business case.
Begin by looking at the current costs of running and supporting your IT operations, then develop a projection of the real costs of implementing and supporting the changes - including retraining and fighting with software that doesn't quite work the way people are used to.
Even if you can make a convincing argument that there could be some cost savings internally, you also need to accept that business more or less runs on Windows and to lesser extent OSX - sooner or later something that you need to do will be incompatible.
Finally I have to ask: aren't there some more immediate and critical things that you could be working on?
If and when you've made the case to management, and they have accepted it, then yeah, you can likely make it work. I recently switched to Ubuntu from Windows 7 and Vista, and have had few problems, including running the parts of MS Office that I need, and even Photoshop in a pinch.
A year ago I wouldn't have said so, but now I'll say that you can replace Windows with Linux and have a happy transition.
That doesn't mean that you can force it on people though.
Three Squirrels
Honestly, about twice a year. Last three serious outages were May 2009, Sept 2009, Apr 2010, come to think of it, they're about due for another one.
That's more often than our Exchange servers have offline.
Everything you touch on is certainly feasible and (although, TONS of work) modestly achievable. However, I hate to say if you're the one who pulled out the "Linux can save us all this money" smoking gun fan boi approach, I'd say you better go back and figure out how much it's going to cost your business/company you work for how much time in training, lost productivity, transitions, oversights, and quirks associated with your mass movement to Linux. Just because you're cutting licensing costs, doesn't mean you're going to save ANY money, downtime or productivity.
I suggest you do some real, in-depth planning and perhaps identify more risks, and even go as far as picking the least ranked department in terms of criticality to your business to start with.
You're touching on changing some real core foundations of your company, so best of luck to you and your project plan. Remember, OpenOffice has no Microsoft Office alternative, either.
Once completed, I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail...
Or: once completed, you will have made a nice guide book for your replacement, someone cheaper and who isn't complaining about getting paid fairly as their responsibilities increase.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Why Linux? If it's simply license costs, well then keep people on Windows. The per-seat software license costs are pretty small compared to your labor + overhead costs of what your IT people will need to put in to retrain user expectations. Even if you're paying $500/user for Windows + Office, that's tiny compared to overall productivity differences.
If people need posixy goodness, give 'em OSX. For the most part they'll probably be happier to not need to mess around as much with desktop config and software installation. Leave Linux to users who can self-install and self-support.
Do not take MS Office away from your Finance and Management teams. Sure, they could learn OpenOffice if they needed, but there's a lot of stuff that Excel does really well that OpenOffice Charts can't. And if a Senior Manager spends even 1-2 hours trying to learn how to use OpenOffice, well, that wasted time just blew away the license cost savings. Re-training and loss of productivity is very expensive, very difficult to factor into your budgeting plans, and impossible not to underestimate.
Finally, why move from Exchange to GMail??? If you don't want to pay as much, consider Kerio or Zimbra, but do not force users to give up integrated messaging, group calendars, and contact databases. We're moving right now from a lousy group calendar to Kerio (Exchange wasn't right for us) because we waste so much time just trying to schedule meetings.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
This post shows why Slashdot needs a "-1 Uninformed" moderation. Doesn't everyone know by now that Google offers Gmail for corporate users with their own domain name? Obviously, it's not free like the @gmail.com service.
I hate to say it, but you should probably stick with Windows.
As a business, running Windows apps under Wine sounds like a constant headache that could leave you dead in the water. Even if everything works today, who knows what tomorrows patches will bring?
From a cost and administrative standpoint, it's probably cheaper to buy the extra Windows licenses than to support and maintain a third OS anyways.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
and foremost of these reasons is the future. with proprietary software, you dont know what will happen in future. your vendor-locked app may be dropped by the supporting company, or, the company can go down under even. you may end up with an app that a lot of people in your organization is using, but now derelict. that goes for all kinds of software. see whats happening to ie6. a lot of big companies have modified it according to their needs, but, now the company that made it is trying to kill it. its more critical for o/s and other stuff.
secondly, cost. with free software, your costs will keep going down and down, and with proprietary, up and up. if you let windows or a similar company which has aggressive vendors to get into your organization from any point and establish themselves, they will push more and more lock-in stuff, your costs will go high and they will practically infest your i.t. you will have to walk any step by engaging with vendors, wont be able to take any decisions on your own independently.
third, and one of the most important, security, and moddability. with free software, your organization will be free to do any modification you want, according to WHATEVER need you have. you wont have to fight with vendors in order to get a half assed solution for your problem, and be prevented from modifying a small bit of code in their proprietary app that you could modify and fix your problem. and, it will cost money.
security is another concern, and it doesnt even need detailing. with free software, any vulnerability will be patchable as soon as they are out. (or you discover them). with proprietary - yeah, you need to wait for vendors, or the parent company to fix them, sitting vulnerable or trying to find intermediate measures to defend your company's ass from attacks while huge companies like microsoft take their slow time for fixing the thing. and another thing - if they think some particular thing is low priority - you are screwed. they may fix it in months, and you may live through the hell of defending/securing your apps without having any access to the code.
so, in for future investment, one should always go with free software. for, EVEN if a free software app totally goes bust, you can still have it, and run it, if your organization is TOO dependent on it.
Read radical news here
Difference for the sake of difference is not progress. Unless you're improving something, don't force your users to waste time learning a new system. If you've already paid for software that people are getting use out of, just leave it alone. This is one thing that frustrates me with a lot of technology companies, they just innovate in circles, recreating existing features and rebranding the same old services, merely making things different and forcing their users to adapt to a new system that offers no significant benefit.
Employee productivity should be a major goal of any good corporate IT force. Not all problems have technological solutions, many have human solutions. You need to include the human factor in your problem solving, and if this means sending out an e-mail asking for feedback or walking around the office talking to folks about what problems they encounter and what features they don't understand, then do it.
This is a main difference between an IT department that people hate, and an IT department that people love.
I would highly decline that idea, since it's much more professional to have a @companyname e-mail over @gmail.
I assume he's talking about Google Apps, and will be keeping the domain name. The bigger problem is the potential security risk of having someone else host your email.
I don't know if you are currently using or plan to use active directory, but over multiple OSs, it won't always work. For exchange though, it will. Your exchange server can be easily configured in pretty much any OS to some degree, which would allow all of your users in either Linux, Mac, or Windows to have access to their e-mails, contacts, and calendars.
Not sure what you're getting at here. Gmail definitely works across different platforms. If nothing else, you can use the web UI. There's even an Outlook plugin for Google Apps.
... Linux has not progressed that much in the desktop environment...
I can understand if you think Windows is still better, but Linux has been progressing.
My first question when a client asks for an upgrade is, "Why?"
If the answer is to have the latest version, I always tell them no. If the answer is to have another feature, I ask them to estimate how much time it will save their employees once it's integrated and in regular use. If you can rework a process to provide more quantitative information with real gains in productivity, then you're spending good money. If you get slightly shinier buttons with menus in different places, you may as well have flushed the money you paid for the upgrade and the money lost on changes in workflow down the toilet.
This has lost me a few jobs, but gained me more long term clients, and I don't have to deal with irate customers who are upset after spending tens of thousands of dollars for zero gains in productivity.
You need to get everyone driving toward eliminating the need for installed applications and
moving towards web based solutions. Once you are on primarily web based solutions the majority
of these issues dissappear. The first great step is to get rid of exchange that is one path
of lockin eliminated.
Got Code?
Oh, I'd agree it's worth looking at for some companies. No arguments there. It sounded like you were implying they "never" went down or something odd like that... which, apparently, you weren't. :)
The last transition I ran (had to leave due to personal reasons) was looking like it was ultimately going to fail.
Why?
OpenOffice - found several critical bugs (all fixed now) that kept people from being able to work effectively
Intel video drivers - found a fun critical bug whenever they plugged into a projector
Didn't have control over what other groups bought as software (big one, make sure management is actually willing to back you up)
* think hard about this one, is there anyone (manager) in the company that will end up buying something without consulting you and who no one wants to go against...
The 3 OSes can easily coexist. Here's how I would go forward:
Don't touch the different platforms at first, start with the applications.
* Web browsers - make sure everyone is running firefox. I found out that 1 person was using IE6 for an important project. they hadn't mentioned it, even when asked directly. Solution: Block Internet explorer access, (I forced the person to move to IE8, yay for small victories)
having people complain when you have it blocked on Windows is much better than having people complain when they are now on Linux. (They will blame Linux)
* Best in class applications - DON'T start with OpenOffice. Make open source applications a regular part of discussions for new software. Evaluate other software you use for open source applications. Make sure they are successful.
* Make sure the other people in IT actually want this change.
* Move them to Linux/OpenOffice and observe problems over at least 1 full release of Fedora, trying to get problems fixed for the next one
* Transition office to OpenOffice on all machines (have just installed first, then default, then uninstall MS Office - very important) watch for issues over at least 6 months
* Transition office to Linux
Yes, this is more like a 2 year plan. But well. Go Slowly. :)
One other point, if anyone wants to move over let them, and help them do it. If they are choosing to switch they could be very very helpful down the road.
I've seen this at multiple places I've worked and its success varied depending on the skills of the IT staff. My last job was a VFX studio, where it was mostly Linux, some Windows, and some Macs. We opt'd for using Active Directory and providing interfaces to it using LDAP and NIS (Active Directory frankly rocks and I am not an MS fan by any stretch). We wrote command-line tools using Python that talked LDAP to the AD server and allowed us to add/retire users, groups, aliases, etc without using any MS GUIs. It has been solid since it was deployed. Of course we had to spend a good chunk of time writing those tools and I'm not a cheap developer. I think it was worth it though.
Of all the machines, the Macs have proved most problematic in getting them to play nicely (I love my Mac, but get the enterprise support down dammit!). It was party due to poor management of the Macs in years previous, partly to do with how Apple has wrapped the gooey BSD center. Snow Leopard has made it much easier. mDNS is a complete pain on a network of any appreciable size (especially if your switches and routers are kinda dumb). Do listen to its siren song.
As for whether or not you should do this, I typically defer to my users. I agree that users should operate with the tools that make them most productive. My new job is at a place that is mostly Windows. I asked for, and got, a Mac. They understood I wanted to be most efficient so I picked the tool I'm most happy with. I would really hate it if someone decided to alter my toolset without deep discussion. I would encourage you to talk with your users and balance your needs for infrastructure management with their desire to use tools they know and love.
And they won't demand training for the latest MS Office with the ribbon? My most recent companies still haven't switched to that version, and are stuck with XP and Office 2003, because they don't want to deal with the problems with the new Office version.
Our local government organisation moved over to Star Office (a close relative to OOffice in 2005. I was told in 2009 that they had more MS Office installations than in 2004. The reason - imperfect conversion to MSOffice formats when they want to exchange documents with outside organisations. The differences are generally small. They (the Council) are now giving up and moving to MS Office 2010 (at a time of tight budgets) though I hope and expect Microsoft are giving them a great price. Like the parent to this comment I like the idea of OpenOffice but that never compensated for my liking VBA more. Purists will mock - why else come here - but I think VBA is a terrific extension of Excel.
I sure would like a front row seat to watch it all happen, though. Really, what you suggest is a good way to have everyone mad at you, right before you get fired.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
running windows and apple is ok. Running linux not so much. the open office.org has been almost shutdown for libre office due to oracle. do you really want to go there.
google app's is a good place to turn for simple word processing. but at a business level not even close to cutting it.
i take it you are an open source nut. I say go for it and make your life a living hell till you quit then the next guy will convert every thing back to windows. evey one will speek of you with a sharp tounge while the other guy gets a reach around from the front office sec.
How much money do you save migrating to Linux when marketing and sales use OS X and Windows with software for those OS's. You have to get all new software that runs under Linux, get everything running under Wine (for the Windows dudes) and provide support people to handle the training and issues. And the OS X guys are screwed, they can't run their software at all.
Artificial cost savings.
Firstly I agree with gothzilla's statements about user comfort and productivity.
But to answer the question about making the different OSes work together, it's just a matter of administration. The tools are all existing. One thing to keep in mind is a slow migration. If you're moving users from OS X or Windows to a Linux distribution I suggest starting with providing them software packages on their current OS that they will be using in Linux. Things such as Firefox, Chrome, Open Office, etc. That way they can get used to the new software on their familiar OS before having everything change.
I like the notion of migrating offices from Windows and OS X to Linux, but if I were personally to do so I wouldn't do it because of financial reasons. I'd have the company make contributions to the appropriate developers and organizations involved - especially if it's a for-profit business using the FOSS technology.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Since you're not giving us a ton of details to work with, let's make some fairly basic assumptions...
1. Any workstations you've already purchased already have Windows pre-installed, and future workstations will almost certainly have Windows pre-installed. So, you're going to spend time (that's "$/hour" in management-speak, even if you're salaried) wiping these machines, installing Fedora or some other Linux distribution, then hoping and praying everything works off the bat. Since you almost certainly won't have the time to call in every Windows OEM license for a refund, this means you're actually spending money (in the form of time) to remove Windows off these machines. For what? If you're thinking about saving money in Office licensing, Open/LibreOffice is available for Windows, so you don't need Fedora or whatever to make that happen. If you're thinking about saving money on antivirus subscriptions, forget it - individual per-machine licenses for anti-virus subscriptions are a drop in the bucket compared to what you'd spend installing Linux, losing manufacturer support on your workstations (or keeping it, but having fewer support options), and retraining users on where things are.
2. Your company has already paid for Exchange. The only time it makes sense to walk away from a pre-existing Exchange installation (it's not that bad, if tended to properly) is if you're either about to outgrow it (i.e. you're on Exchange 2003 and running into the 75 GB data file limitation) or planning on replacing the hardware or software soon anyway (i.e. hosting it on a 7-year-old server and looking to upgrade). If you're not at that point, forget it - it's already paid for, so there's no savings to be had there. If you are at that point, however, you need to think clearly about compliance, performance, and migration issues. Gmail by itself can handle user@domain.com e-mail, but you already have to have that account somewhere for it to map up. Otherwise, you're looking at Google Apps, which may or may not meet your needs and may or may not be as cheap as you think it'll be. Then there's the issue of migrating the boss' 15 GB Outlook data file to Google Apps (ha!), whether your company has enough bandwidth to handle every user in the organization having to pull their e-mail from "the cloud", and whether or not you're encumbered with PCI or Sarbannes-Oxley data retention policies (keeping seven years of information, content filters to block out sensitive data from the e-mail system, etc. etc. etc.). Depending on your situation, you might be able to migrate to another groupware solution (Zimbra, OpenXchange, Novell Groupwise, *shudder* Lotus Notes, etc.), you might be able to migrate to a hosted platform (hosted Exchange, Google Apps), or you might be stuck with Exchange. Either way, "I'm sick of Exchange!" isn't a business case for making that migration.
3. What's your motivation? If your motivation is "Open source is awesome!", don't be surprised if your bosses laugh at you and tell you to get back to work. Business people don't mind paying for things that work well enough to get the job done and are (rightly) suspicious of anything that claims it can get the job done for less. Consequently, if you're going to push forward a solution of your choice, whatever that might be, you're going to get some push back. Will it open their reports? Better check that first. How quickly can we get it back up if it breaks? Will we have access to the information if a backhoe hits our Internet connection? More often than not, "how much does it cost" is so far down the list of concerns that it can be safely ignored, at least to a point.
Personally, I'm getting the "I just got out of college, got my first IT job, and want to save the world one Linux installation at a time" vibe, and that's okay. There's room to stretch your legs there - file server upgrades, for example, are a fantastic place to stop buying
Well actually... since google has almost perfect uptime and availability moving to gmail servers should make alot of sense. Unless of course you are committing crimes as a corporation and need to be able to delete large chunks of emails in a hurry before the federal investigators get ahold of it... then I would have to agree that google is a bad choice. There is one really good reason though that I can see for keeping internal mail exchangers. if your internet goes down then your intranet mail does as well. However in a large multi location operation that can happen anyway.
You should only consider RHEL, SUSE,CentOS, or Ubuntu LTS for business use. Fedora release are only supported for a few months.
Of course,since you don't know what you're doing it won't matter. Nobody is going to let you destroy the business with your silly plans.
Oh, takes about two hours. But I actually know how the fuck to install and configure Exchange. In fact..... lets see....... hmmm..... oh look the logs I take say 20 minutes a YEAR and that is only for service packs. Oh and because I did some capacity planning the usual defrag hasn't been needed because the databases I run have large amounts of growth room and hence defragmentation is minimal.
FFS, /. should shut the ever living fuck up about Exchange, most of the whiny bitches dont know shit about it. Or servers for that matter of any kind.
gmail itself, 2009. countrywide mobile data connection: two days ago. the whole day. local problems? all the time. slow connection because overseas cables got cut? last year for weeks. if you have your stuff in your local network, there is only so much that can go wrong. if it's hosted on some foreign servers in a foreign country that you can't control anything about, possible problems are suddenly much more. the cloud: the biggest fault the computing industry ever created. the wrongest direction we can move to. because in the end, if there's a problem, it's still my fault, and i have to fix it. but most of the time, i won't be able to, anymore. bosses won't like that.
Fedora is a bleeding-edge distro with a rapid release cycle and relatively short support period. If Linux makes sense for you at all, you should probably be looking at Ubuntu LTS or Debian on the desktop, and RHEL/CENTOS/Debian for servers. Fedora would not be my first (or even second...) choice for deployment in an enterprise environment, unless most of your users are *NIX software developers (and they're developing for RHEL/CENTOS as the target environment).
This guy clearly hasn't got a clue. Gmail for companies allows you to use your own domain name. Since he doesn't even bother to look up this most basic thing in choosing an email solution, he clearly hasn't researched beyond "what does MS offer", so how can we then trust anything else he says?
My advice, find someone who actually has used multiple solutions and ask him/her. If you ask a MS shop/fanboy what the solution is, then the answer is going to be MS. You wouldn't ask a ricer about best car would you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
>I assume he's talking about Google Apps, and will be keeping the domain name. The bigger problem is the potential security risk of having someone else host your email.
No, the bigger problem is ever using unencrypted e-mail as a secure communications medium.
Well actually... since google has almost perfect uptime
False. Gmail Outage Marks Sixth Downtime in Eight Months
Unless of course you are committing crimes as a corporation and need to be able to delete large chunks of emails in a hurry before the federal investigators get ahold of it... then I would have to agree that google is a bad choice.
Company trade secrets, financial information, etc should *never* be hosted on a 3rd party site. Emails, right or wrong, will have that information...or at least internal emails will. Of course, once you go to gmail there's no such thing as internal email.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
This is basically why you need open standards. You just say "we'll support any email client as long as it talks IMAP", and there you go. For calendaring and file formats do similar things. Not all of that is super duper shiny at the moment but not worse than the pain you get from intermixing various micros~1 versions of the same product. (Especially anything ending in 'x' as in .docx, .xlsx, is extra special painful, so just ditch it.) Personally I'd be happy to move the bulk over to macos and not focus too much on "it has to be linux", but do what you like.
However, I would advise you to look at the "LiMux"[sic] project, that's how the IT guys at Munich municipality are moving everyone over to their very own distribution. Not necessairily to duplicate what they do, but to learn from their mistakes. Their main point: Look at what your users need. Don't ask them what software they need, but work with them and get them to show you what their workflows are like, and give them the tools they need to do their work. That way you get to steer the choices in a direction that helps you run your shop while at the same time giving them as-good-as or preferrably better tools to do what they need to do. Which is what IT support ought to be about anyhow.
So, stop reading slashdot and get to work.
Could be free, depends on the org size.
I've been there, done that, and gotten the pink slip. No, not literally - but I've looked into doing things like this in the past.
Consider for a second why you want to do this before you approach it, as well as the added overhead of maintaining multiple, divergent systems.
As for Exchange -> Gmail... why? Seems like a (significant) downgrade to me, and I'm particularly un-fond of Exchange.
If you're considering multiple apps under WINE and completely abandon the existing OS, I suspect you're a bit of a fanatic (or simply inexperienced). You want to do something like this with baby steps. One application at a time!
What's the justification? Licensing costs? Avoiding malware? Reducing management overhead? What is your end goal?
The only conceivable time I can imagine moving common workstations to LInux right now is if you're running on ancient XP machines and/or the necessary applications are either minimal and do not necessarily require Windows, or you plan to move to something like XenApp for important Windows apps. Moving already-licensed W7 machines to Linux "just because" seems stupid unless there's a good time/money management reason for it.
IF you're silly enough to approach this, I suggest you look at user requirements - and then start replacing and/or migrating one thing at a time. If you want to get rid of Exchange, I suggest you look at that first, consider options, and do a migration only once you've figured out that it makes sense after considering all use-case scenarios.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Basically, the answer is yes, they can work together. I'm not sure, though, whether that's the important question.
I've run a couple different networks, now, with a mixture of Linux, Windows, and OSX clients. The easiest way to do this is probably still to keep a Windows domain running, since Linux/OSX support Windows authentication and file sharing better than Windows supports Linux authentication and file sharing.
It will take a little work and a bit of knowledge, and even then you probably won't get everything running completely seamlessly. Some of the biggest problems are still pretty low-level stuff. Each uses different filesystems, including different methods of using permissions and metadata. If you're using external hard drives, you'll want to stick with FAT, which kind of sucks. Linux can support HFS and AFP. It's possible for Windows to support AFP and HFS, too. IIRC OSX can support ext3 and NTFS through FUSE. Everything can support SMB these days. None of these solutions are perfect, though.
When you have these different operating systems using the same file shares, you'll get some random hidden files here and there-- both Windows and OSX tend to do this. If you try to consolidate profiles/home-directories across operating systems, you'll get files from each OS that will seem useless in the others. So... yeah, it can work, but there are complications that you'll need to figure out.
**BUT** this is not really the best way to make this decision. These systems can hypothetically work together, but you don't work in a hypothetical office. You should start by figuring out your offices needs, taking the employee workflows into account, and then evaluate which products will best support those needs. You probably should take licensing costs into account, but you should also consider that it's more complicated and time-consuming to support a mixed environment. Also, if you're asking this question, I assume you don't exactly have the experience in dealing with this kind of mixed environment, so that's a strike against the idea.
I wouldn't generally rely on running things in WINE. If you want to run Adobe products, stick to a supported platform. It probably is a good idea to standardize as many applications across platforms as possible. If you can, get everyone on OpenOffice and Firefox. The more common applications and tools you're using cross-platform, the easier it will be to switch people between platforms without headaches. In fact, that may be a good place to start with your experiment: If you want to use OpenOffice, see if you can move everyone over to OpenOffice. If you can get people using OpenOffice and Firefox and Thunderbird(+Lightning) without any problems, and if those are the only apps those people are using, then moving them to Linux should be pretty easy. If people throw a hissy fit because they don't have MS Office anymore, then moving them to Linux is a non-starter.
Whatever you do, I advise coming up with standardized disk images per each department or job function. Customize them with whatever you need to work in your particular mixed environment, but try to keep them the same for people with the same jobs. Like put all of your graphic designers on Macs with Adobe CS installed, and put all your normal office workers on Windows with MS Office-- or whatever. Troubleshooting problems in a mixed environment is hard enough without dealing with everyone having a unique system.
This post shows why Slashdot needs a "-1 Uninformed" moderation. (Sorry, couldn't resist) Actually, you can get gmail using your own domain for free if you have less than 50 users. I'm using it for my business' email and I don't pay anything.
Protect your browser with the Force Safe Search add-on
FTA:
"All Considered...
It may sound bad, but Gmail does appear to have a reasonable amount of uptime, all considered. Following last fall's series of outages, a Google rep told the IDG News Service that Gmail suffers only about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, giving it an average uptime rate of 99.9 percent. He noted that, according to some independent reports, on-premise e-mail systems tend to see twice the amount of offline time--anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, on average, every 30 days."
If you are going to post a link to support an argument then at least read the whole thing first. I said almost and I think that 99.9% fulfills almost.
Your job as the IT resource for the organization is to give the staff the tools that they need to do their job. Do the sales people want new tools, or are you trying to force new tools upon them? The sales staff pays your salary. As much as it sucks to hear it, that is the bottom line. They have a workflow and a way of doing things that is centered on the tools they have. Why are you trying to upset the apple cart?
Linux has matured to the point where if you are starting from scratch, it is a viable path to take. You can get the functionality you need at a fraction of the cost. Linux is not enough better than Windows (or OSX) to migrate onto it (for most organizations). If you like Linux, bring it in where you can. If you need to develop a new application, consider a LAMP stack instead of SQL and IIS. If your boss randomly starts whining about licensing costs for Office, suggest OpenOffice.
Do not take it upon yourself to "make things better" if you are the only person who seems to care. Let the users tell you what they need, and help guide them to the best solution. I have seen careers ruined by people who truly wanted to make things better, but were too caught up in their own heads to realize that nobody else seemed to care. They end up "solving" problems that do not need to be solved, and in the process create a lot of upset and headaches. Migrations are never simple. Often times going from one version of an application to another is a big enough headache, nevermind one OS to another.
Faster ? that's a hardware spec, more reliable ? I don't remember the last time that my OS have crash. more scalable ? Even if you have infinite money, Linux will be clearly more scalable, I don't think that any supercomputer are based on OS X. more secure ? all your base (information) belong us(Apple inc.)
and BTW you are quite right about the trade secrets.
just use fingers to touch OS X and feet to run Windows, while voice-controlling Linux.
You can do this in GroupWise. Seriously.
The Apple client for GroupWise works. Yes, it did as of this summer. Lately, Apple hasn't been busy crippling it, so I suspect it's still ok. Works for 10.4 and 10.5.
The Windows clients include a native client and an Outlook plug-in. This was slick in Outlook 2007.
Would you prefer the GroupWise Web Access Client?
GroupWise server runs on NetWare, SUSE 10 or above (I think), Windows Server '03 and '08. The Mobile Server might be fun to look at.
Yes, GroupWise works. Drew does this and it works.
But I know you will resist, and ohers will dismiss this option as ludicrous and obsolete, if not dangerous and a true threat to national security, your and their sanity, and of course it's Novell, which has to be bad, if not just plain old.
But hey, it does work. You'll have other things to look at, but it's there.
Now let the flames begin.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Recently enough that I remember it happening, and I could not get email for any of my five sites using google apps, nor my work account that just migrated to gmail.
I don't care if it is a virus, a power failure, a hardware failure, or a bug in the software.
Google mail goes down. The great thing is, I am not frantically reading logs to try to get it back up.
I get to say 'Gmail is down, hope it comes back soon'.
If you put a wolverine, a badger, and a mountain lion into a box, will they cuddle?
The main problem with gmail as a corporate mail solution is the complete lack of HIPAA compliance. Gmail says right up front they aren't the guys for that, and if your company is large enough to have an HR person that actually knows anything about HR, chances are gmail is off the list for this reason alone.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Take your pick:
-1 Uninformed
-1 Retarded
There are pros and cons both ways, but you don't seem to have any idea what you're talking about.
You forgot about:
Want your users to use Windows 7 instead of Windows XP? They'll demand training. And get it, if the company wants to keep them.
You can run some of the same software on all three platforms. KDE stuff like Koffice f ex.
What problems would that be?
From my experience working at a Windows/Mac school district and messing with linux in my spare time, I would say that it's generally easier to get Mac or Linux boxes to integrate into an existing Windows environment, than to try to get Windows to cooperate with non-Microsoft tools. Just my two cents.
You haven't provided anywhere near enough information to give useful advice. What are you trying to accomplish? What are the users doing? What tools are they using (releases count), etc. Who would be using Linux and why (if it's going to be low cost windows replacements, then perhaps rehink your choice of distribution...)
You need to trade off budget, vs. requirements vs. desiderata .. it's why IT is a profession not a hobby ;>
As to the question you asked, if you keep things on Exchange, and CIFS everyone can share. If you migrate to IMAP based servers everyone can share, except for calendaring (outlook's Calendar features are not the same as what you get with Google Apps, so be careful what you threaten your user community with).
How do Sales and Marketing communicate? What do they need to collaborate on? If it's just PDF documents from Marketing->Sales then the question is pretty meaningless. If they need to coauthor documents you might have very different Requirements.
Personally I work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment, and sometimes use personal Macs attached. Engineering is CentOS based, my Linux laptop is Ubuntu, my Windows laptop is XP and my Windows VM inside of the Ubuntu environment is Win7u. Macs are aged PPC based devices.
Depending on just what you are trying to share and WHY makes all the difference ... but it can be done. Trivially in many cases; less so in others.
As others aptly noted, taking Excel away from power users is seldom a successful strategy.
You're talking about coordinating an IT infrastructure deployment with Windows and OS X for sure, two proprietary platforms. If you want a linux desktop to work with the kinds of things you're going to need without a lot of fuss, you're looking at RHEL, SLED, CentOS, or Ubuntu. I recommend Ubuntu, it's as close as you can get to OS X for PCs (global menu default for 11.04+) . If it will decrease training overhead, by all means, configure it like OS X as far as you can. Then, for Photoshop and other excellent pieces of software like that, let Adobe know how many licenses you would buy if they made it available for Ubuntu.
Fedora's primary objective, besides existing, is pushing software liberty and cutting edge stuff as much as possible. Your objective is to get your job done. It's going to make your life easiest if all operating systems you're using share exactly that same objective. Let the sales software vendor know you want an Ubuntu version also-- is this Micros we're talking about? TCO will be lower if you use one desktop platform for all your machines, so I would see what you can do about creating a long-term plan for that.
NOT FEDORA. You want a linux distro that is supported for years, plural. You do /not/ want to be reinstalling your users desktops every year or doing the "shrug" dance when someone asks for something that your no-longer-supported edition won't do.
parent got downmodded due to why, exactly ? 'disagree' ?
Sorry, I don't have any mod points. But it seems to be the best answer so far. Even for an analogy.
Company trade secrets, financial information, etc should *never* be hosted on a 3rd party site. Emails, right or wrong, will have that information...or at least internal emails will. Of course, once you go to gmail there's no such thing as internal email.
I see this general idea posted a lot, but in actual fact real corporations and governments frequently trust such information to third parties. Contractors and subcontractors are privy not only to the government secrets that they are working with to perform their duties, but each other's internal documents. Companies like Iron Mountain based their entire business model on archiving, protecting, and, under the proper conditions, destroying other company's internal documents.
The Fortune 50 company I used to work for contracted their entire corporate IT infrastructure to Dell. Dell provided workstations, IT help desk, and ran all the internal and external servers. Below the level of the CTO pretty much every person in the IT department actually worked for Dell.
Security companies like Brinks provide all the physical security including guards and cameras for lots of companies. The guards who work for our security contractor have more access to our building than I do as a regular employee.
In short, most companies of any size already trust a good portion of their internal information to other companies on a regular and ongoing basis. How is this different? You write the contract to ensure severe penalties for the third party in the event the information is deliberately compromised, less serve penalties for accidental compromise and you do business.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I have to say that you'll going to have a lot of resistance and create ill feelings by eliminating Outlook and Exchange. It's hard to see that you will get a huge amount of savings, and will probably irritate some of the people (or person) who signs your paycheck. Even you save a few bucks, no one will remember that when your access to gmail is down or some exec's blackberry doesn't synch right. I'd recommend being very careful and getting the senior execs sign-out off.
Also, it would be helpful if you described your "company" is some detail so the slashdot advice isn't (as) random.
There might be others in your organization who do "real work", that don't ever need to access a linux box. Marketing, finance, and even those "low lifes" who sell your product to customers. I suspect that over your firm's entire environment, relatively few need (or even know of) linux kernals. I thing you need to get out of the cube more often.
I see this as an opportunity to bring up the topic of migrating the majority of our office from Windows 7 to Linux and from Exchange to Gmail. However, this would result in three departments each running a different system: Windows, OS X, and most likely Fedora.
You expect stiff resistance ahead from sales, management, and marketing.
Which means that the only driving force behind Linux in your shop is you. The one-man band in IT.
[time flow considered] 1] Focus on the cutbacks that don't require OS changes AFTER you made sure no actual OS change is required. 2] I think maintaining an inhomogeneous infrastructure with three different workstation OS is just overkill. Thus I recommend you to reduce that number (max. 2). 3] I strongly recommend you to migrate Applications first using the legacy system and then migrate the OS at once. Doing that way employees will notice slight changes over time regarding their applications (e.g. OO.org) and get used to the changes. When the OS change happens (e.g. Win -> G/L) they will notice the change in behavoiur, look, etc. but are ALREADY familiar with the applications! 4] Choose your GNU/Linux distribution wisely then. Fedora required you to dist-upgrade quite often. Is that ok for you? do you have the capacities to handle all the installations? Wil you use large portions of that distributions software (e.g. is there deamnd for SELinux/FLASK)? 5] Migrate the sales dept. machines to your target OS and the virtualize. It gives you more freedom, control and security (create VM once destroy often). 6] Avoid GMail. DON'T trust the organization begind (I didn't say company because it is none). 7] Adobe Stuff does not work so well using WINE. It depends on the versions of WINE and the target application softare however.
Mac Linux and Windows can all deal with Windows network shares quite adeptly.
I'm going to assume if you're going to go cross platform and gmail, you expect to use google apps as an office replacement as well.
Can it work? Absolutely. Should it be done? Probably not.
Road bumps and Walls to expect:
Start getting people to use google apps office equivalents, solve those problems first.
If everyone can stomach google apps, then consider the email. Have your Exchange server toss up a test group of email up there.
If the above worked, you might be able to get away with it, but keep in mind:
Bifurcating support is expensive in both time and money.
Users on each disparate system will not be able to self help people on other systems.
Getting people spun up on new/different systems will be very painful for them, and you.
AD integration is nearly a waste of time on anything but Windows.
Software AND patch management on a Windows network can be trivially easy with very little setup, not quite so much on the other platforms.
Wine is purely reserved for one off scenarios, if a large part of your plan is wine, you'd be better off with windows or RDesktop and a terminal server.
The different UI that will require retraining everyone?
What if that happens at your own site? How much does it cost? What's your backup regimen? How long does it take to get everyone's mail archives from Iron Mountain, and are you even getting that scale of backups? If so, how are you doing it and how do you know?
People keep drawing an equivalency between a Gmail outage and an on-site outage. The on-site outage might be *very* expensive, if it is even recoverable. Gmail's "sixth downtime" probably had a lot smaller impact than your first one.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
What nonsense!
Personally, I think an Outlook/Exchange solution is much more productive for heavy office email users than the clunky thin-client Gmail offers, but this is one of the most egregious examples of FUD-seeding I've seen.
(Disclaimer: I'm an IT Director / CIO for a smallish organization, and I do run Linux on my desktop.)
I know nothing about your environment, but my guess to you is that you're trying to jump into this too soon. What value does your plan provide to your users, or to the organization as a whole? Remember that your IT director and your CIO don't care about the "coolness" or running Linux on the desktop. Instead, they will care about overhead, costs, long-term support, integration, and IT strategy. You're doing an IT inventory, which could be the start of crafting a new strategy, but you're not there yet.
Rather than try to make an immediate push to integrate Linux into your IT environment, I'd recommend a phased approach. You seem to advocate running Linux in your work desktop architecture. So these are the general phases that will get you there:
1. Take an inventory
That's what you're doing now. Are there applications that are only available for Windows? Do any of your "power users" require obscure features in, say, Microsoft Office to do their job? Maybe your users need to work with an outside web application (perhaps a vendor web site) that requires IE. Is your hardware Linux-compatible? (Check wireless network cards and high-end video cards.) Or your printers?
Most importantly, understand why you are moving to Linux. Why are you asking to make the move? If you don't have a good answer to this, you're going to have an uphill struggle the rest of the way.
2. File formats
Look at what other files your organization produces and consumes. Can Linux work with them all? What applications read and write them? This may have been covered in step #1, but match them up anyway.
3. Web applications
Do you have applications that can run via the web? Maybe you have a group calendar system that also has a "web client". You mentioned GMail, and that's a great option, but your legal department will want to look closely at any SaaS agreement. Does Firefox on Linux support these web applications?
4. Desktop applications
You won't be able to move all applications to web delivery (whether SaaS or supported in-house) so what applications must live on the desktop? Are there Linux versions for these? Or are you stuck with some Windows-only applications? Those will be your roadblocks. Your IT Director and CIO will not look favorably to mixing the desktop platform options further, raising the effort required to support your desktop environment.
5. Protocols
Do you have any Microsoft-specific protocols running on your network? Are you running Active Directory? Microsoft Exchange? The thing to look for at this stage is that Linux apps can talk to all your back-office applications.
6. Early adopters
Once you have set up your users to use web applications and open desktop applications, you can start thinking about migrating users to the Linux platform. Do you have a smallish group of users, who would be excited to make the switch? These are your early adopters, and who (if you do things right) could become your allies. Maybe this is your server support team, or your database administrators, or some other "technical" team.
But ultimately, it will depend on your particular environment. As I said, don't get ahead of yourself. You're in the information-gathering stage; that's what you said the assignment was about. Maybe you aren't ready to start recommending a major shift in the desktop ecosystem - not yet, anyway.
>Is Gmail for everyone? No, but it certainly is worth looking at for some companies.
A lot of people don't seem to understand that Gmail has a corporate offering. They think of Gmail only as the personal individual Gmail account.
Some of them don't seem to know that you can make Gmail work just like a hosting provider's IMAP, you can setup the DNS including MX, it has secure SMTP, etc. It's often a better choice, security-wise, than the typical hosting provider.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
does HIPAA even apply to anything beside health related services? I suppose you could argue that it would include lawyers working health related cases where medical records are required for litigation. but that all seems kinda niche to me and not representative of the majority of corporate interests. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
>You can use gmail and have custom domain .. I would take gmail over Exchange in a heartbeat.
A lot of people who post whenever these threads come up don't seem to understand this. Gmail is a TLS-enabled MX and IMAP in your DNS Zone. One of its features is a good webmail system, but it's much more useful than just this.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
We're doing it where I work. It's pretty easy, actually. nfs, netatalk, and samba: there, all workstations are using the same fileserver.
Your main mistake is upgrading from Exchange to Google, instead of to postfix+courier. Upgrade and losing recurring licensing costs: good. Outsourcing: bad, especially if all your incoming email isn't encrypted. Fuck the cloud. What are you going to do, if some day Google happens to make a change that you don't like? You can always refrain from upgrading to the latest version of courier, but you can't opt out of the latest and "greatest" version of gmail, and fuck knows what Google is doing with your plaintext. Whenever Exchange is really the problem, Gmail is almost never the answer.
You other mistake is Fedora. I'm not saying that's a bad OS, but it's as inappropriate as Gentoo, if you want stability. Get something "lamer."
You are right about OpenOffice. That will be painless. You will hear FUD. Just remember it's FUD.
Yep, some people won't be able to switch. You have to let 'em keep what they have. Just don't worry about them. Upgrade the server(s) first, give a Linux desktop to people who aren't locked into anything proprietary, and be happy with what you end up with. Resist any new proprietary stuff; get any new tasks done with commodity/free/crossplatform apps where possible (and it's usually possible). You won't ever migrate away from the lockin stuff, you but you might eventually phase it out.
You are correct and GMAIL can work with Active Directory for GMAIL domain users. I moved my domain there long ago and my users are much happier. Users especially like the fact that they have unlimited email storage and can search gigs in seconds.
How many workers in your office would prefer using Linux and OpenOffice.org to using Windows 7 and MS Office? I suspect almost all of them would prefer using Windows 7 and MS Office. Even a small dip in productivity or worker satisfaction would outweigh savings from using FOSS.
Gmail vs Exchange is a different matter. I suspect most workers under 40 would prefer Gmail, and most older workers would prefer Exchange. If there are savings, a switch might be justified.
Almost everything you mention can be done separate from the OS. All of the applications can be installed concurrently.
First make a push to install Linux compatible software: Firefox, OpenOffice, GIMP, etc.
Then make a push to stop upgrading the proprietary solutions when not needed. The new intern may not complain about it and develop the necessary skill set. Now you have one more user willing to use that solution. Rinse, repeat.
Gmail vs. Exchange is a contentious issue. You are not just changing an Email client, you change a contacts list, calendar, and meeting tool. This also ignores the in house vs the cloud discussion. It really depends. I think the smaller, younger, or cash strapped the organization, the more likely Gmail makes sense to a point. When you go super large with multiple remote branches the cloud starts to look good again as well. Exchange though has a lot of traction and benefits in the mid-sized, established, local organization.
Linux can be pushed out concurrently as well, although I would limit it to the most technical of users: IT staff, developers, and engineers.
We already have this system in place, in a medium sized company. You will need ldap functioning for Linux (CentOS) and Mac users, and you will need Active Directory (obviously) for your windows users for authentication and access to resources. We use a product called psync (actually it was bought out and I can't think of the name at the moment) that syncs password changes between AD and ldap. You make sure to keep usernames the same between both systems. Make sure all data that needs to be shared out are on Samba shares. We still use Exchange though.
Actually they can! ;)
I've integrated 3k Mac laptops using ReFiT with triple boot, Active Directory Integrated with Mac Open Directory for single sign-on, SMB shares for the Windows, Apple and Linux in XServe using SMB, AppleTalk and NFS, everything fully kerberized.
If you prefer you can setup Parallels with Windows and Fedora instead of the triple boot system, this way you can take advantage of the best of the 3 OS's, and a Mac always look nicer than a PC...
Tiago Rosado
Security and Integration Consultant
Mac OS X, Linux, BSD, Windows
Certified System Administrator
Java, C#, C++, SQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Perl, VBA, .NET, Visual Studio,....Linux and Windows
I got that from a job posting that my father-in-law sent me.
And at 35, you're oooooolllllldddd in corporate IT.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Yes they can be made to play nice.
There are some caveats:
Do not even TRY to use OSX's server offerings, they don't work (as in are not 100% reliable).
Avoid Active Directory like the plague, for such it tis. If you have to use it, minimize its involvement
All server tech where possible should be linux, and preferably 64 bit debian
If you have to use Windows servers, virtualize them rather than wasting valuable hardware - Xen or KVM are ok free choices (just please don't use LVM mounts, pleeease), or apparently ESX is no longer as slow as a smacked out snail if you want to use VMWare. VMWare has some really nice features too that the others are lacking a bit at the moment.
If the company uses Outlook, you are going to have to install Exchange, but virtualize it. Its a piece of shit but its better than it used to be. Just dont waste a whole machine on it, a vm is suffiicient.
As a desktop linux my personal choice would be Xubuntu. Once upon a time it would have been Kubuntu but KDE4 pisses me off so much I've jumped ships. GNOME is a joke (no, it is).
Fedora is one of the worst linuxen I have ever used, but I haven't used the last 2 or 3 releases (what are we up to, 13 now? can it find usb devices and play all the codecs that every other distro can yet? and how is the font management going these days?)
For users that have to use Outlook under Linux, you can *try* with Wine but a simpler solution is to use Virtualbox - this is an unbelievably fast VM system, much faster than VM, and its free in most distros repositories now. Wouldnt use Virtualbox for a server VM but as a desktopper its a beauty.
For winblows you are going to have to use SMB/CIFS for disk mounts and printer finding but thats fine, samba works very well. If possible, mount drives from the OSX boxes via SMB rather than via AFP. Its slightly tricky to set up but its worth it because AFP is not re-entrant, which means server crashes take out user drives non-transparently.
Single-sign-on (SSO if you must) can be set up for all 3 from linux boxes. You can even do AD sign ons, its a little tricky but once its setup it stays up.
Now, you can argue if you like - but you are arguing against about 20 years of experience and a LOT of pissed off users who rejoiced under the stability of the final configuration, so I am blithely assuming that whatever you go through, you will come back to the same conclusions.
Don't forget that your administration may use certain Word or Excel add-ins or simple VB macros. These will not work under OpenOffice, most likely not even on the Microsoft Office suite for OS X.
The difference between Iron Mountain and Google is that all of Iron Mountain's people are background-checked and bonded. I'd be concerned that Google likely includes a lot of young hormonal ideologues who who would think nothing of breaking confidence if it supported their latest "save the planet" cause. (a little like /.)
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
We have no fucking clue what you should do
... so when did this ever stop a slashdotter from weighing in? :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
If anyone in your company has spreadsheets full of macro's that auto update and provide other functionality, how are you going to replace that? OO.o is fine for general office stuff, but you just don't have the macro support you have in MS Office. Also, does your company use a lot of templates? Will they import into OO.o properly? Are you going to setup everyone installation in your office to have OO.o save in MS standard format for your users who will be working with other companies and might be clueless how to change the default document type?
I'd like to go to Ubuntu full time, but I can't because of certain applications like Abelton Live and Adobe Suite. I'm on OS X and I have VirtualBox to run XP so I can use a program that works with MS office because their's no alternative. I don't use it that often, but I have to have it to do certain things. I could do the same in Ubuntu, but then I can't run Abelton Live or Adobe Suite in a manner that's acceptable and that's just not going to happen. And don't mention wine because even though I think it's a great concept, it's just not reliable enough.
Alright, so you have been forced to use Lotus Notes and now you are scarred for life.
Join the crowd.
Get therapy.
That will teach you to question the modding system!
ASLR + DEP + UAC blocks a lot of crap.
Sticking with XP isn't worth the risk.
Because of these types of articles I love /. that we as a community can give all our talent to solve issues or give advice, really one of the coolest things on the Inet.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I'm part of a team looking into moving our company to Linux in the long term. Some 3000+ workstations with windows XP, MS office, exchange, etc.
Currently we're looking at Ubuntu and servers in Debian. My assessment is:
- You need directory services. Fedora Directory services (389 server) is hard to install on Debian/Ubuntu and has a lot of trouble with their two way AD replication. Other people who have worked with OpenLDAP report severe corruption when synchronizing multiple masters across unreliable links. Both arer a pain to set up windows clients for.
- Both Ubuntu 9.10 and Macs can join Active Directory using Likewise Open. Ubuntu 10.04 included it in their main repository, adverrtised the integration and completely fucked it up. Most of the bugs are fixed in the PPA, but they haven't bothered to put the fixes in their supported repositories for the last 6 months, and the same bugs are in 10.10. Upgrading 9.10 -> 10.04 with break your configuration, unless you know enough to add the PPAs beforehand or a private repo. With the PPAs it works well, but single-sign-on doesn't work (worked in 9.10) and it has problems when working from home.
- Some things aren't implemented. Windows can authenticate with Radius (WPA Enterprise, VPN, etc) with the machine's AD password. Ubuntu + Likewise doesn't have that capability, though it's relatively easy to script yourself. You have to log in and enter a password for the wireless, (hard if you need the wireless to log in) or set your password to be used for anyone who uses the computer (bad if you ever change your password)
- Ubuntu has a bunch of embarrassing bugs that prevent me from just giving it to one of my users. The original OOo in 10.04 couldn't even join cells selected with the mouse. It's sad when MS's products have more quality than yours.
Maybe we'll start over looking at Fedora, I'd like to hear about people's experiences with their quality assurance.
All that aside, the other big points to watch:
- Email is a problem. Web based solutions preclude you from having PSTs locally for personal history/backups (which is very common at my company). If you don't switch to a web based solution then Evolution is a mess with its exchange integration. The old connector only connects through OWA, and loses synchronization (says there are unread emails but won't show you them or download them, silently stops updating, etc) and crashes every once in a while. The MAPI connector has some weird issues with character encoding. You can use Thunderbird but you lose all the Gnome integration. And either you switch windows users to thunderbird too or support two different programs. You could install a Linux based email and calendaring server too, that can sync email, appointments and everything else with linux windows, macs and phones , but it's nontrivial. Just choosing the right combination of solutions is a big project.
- Access and excel macros have to be rebuilt. A lot of people at our company use them. Every department seems to have a VBA expert building mini-applications and data analysis spreadsheets connected to our data warehouse that then become business-critical. This is not a problem until you want to switch.
- MS Project. If your people use it and need it, there is just no good replacement. Serena Openproj is the closest, but it hasn't been updated in two years and has a bunch of bugs. Plus it's missing things like multi-project and a bunch of features our users need.
- Custom apps: Our intranet won't show well under Firefox and we have a bunch of custom apps (VB and other languages). The former have to be redone anyway to update for a new IE, but the latter are a lot of work in our case.
A migration project is a big undertaking that probably won't be completely justified by cost. On the other hand I don't agree with just laying on your laurels and mindlessly updating to the latest MS offering. Do look into switching every once in a while. If things are good enough for you then switch, even if it takes a lot of work. You
A lot of people seem to be crying about Gmail being a free service, and therefore unreliable (even though that's not what the poster's asking us about -- and I'll get back on-topic shortly :) -- for those that don't know, it's worth noting that Gmail isn't just a free service with no guarantee of uptime; it's part of the Google Apps For Business package, which is available as both a free service (for up to 50 employees -- 'standard edition') and as a commercial service (costing a mere $50 per year, per employee -- 'premier edition')... which (hello naysayers) has a 'three-nine' (99.9%) uptime guarantee in the SLA.
If three-nines is good enough for your business, then having a great web-based email (with someone else to worry about backups, spam filtering, security, etc), shared contacts, calendaring and documents-in-the-cloud (if you need it), etcetera, is fantastic value at only $50/year/person. And if you're a small business with less than 50 staff online -- and you don't need the guarantee provided by the SLA -- then being free, it's even better value.
Obviously, some of this might not suit everyone's tastes for whatever reasons, but to damn Gmail in a business situation purely because you think "you're trusting your business to a free service" is to miss a great opportunity which would be not only be perfectly suitable but also great value to a lot of businesses.
FWIW Google also offer 'Apps For Business' for Education, Government and Non-Profit as well as the above mentioned editions, so they seem pretty serious about it being a business offering of worthy consideration -- and, whilst I don't know of any colleges, governments nor charities that use GAFB, I do know of several businesses that use it (besides mine)... and they are more than happy with the service provided.
So in my opinion, switching from an in-house system (such as Exchange) to using a cloud-based service such as GAFB is a perfectly valid business option -- if it suits your business / business needs.
Furthermore, to get back on topic and answer the actual question asked, 'can Windows and OS X and Fedora all work together?' -- yes, of course they can.
If you've already got OS X and Windows on your network, then you'll have little problem integrating Linux boxes alongside. I'd do a staged roll-out, changing to Gmail and OpenOffice first (in whichever order is most appropriate / convenient in your business), and /then/ changing whatever Windows PCs you can over to the Linux of your choice.
Personally I wouldn't choose Fedora as my choice of Linux for use in the office - as other posters rightly point out; it's a bit too cutting edge. Realistically we considered our options as being: Debian, Ubuntu LTS (long-term service release) or just plain Ubuntu -- with the most-stable/least-risky being first in that list. If having later versions of certain software is an important criteria to you then you might want to choose something further down that list.
We ended up choosing Ubuntu LTS for the servers, and latest release Ubuntu for desktops -- for various reasons we favoured the single-vendor option in this instance -- although I've got no problem with Debian for either of these, if the software suits your needs. Obviously your requirements aren't ours, so your mileage may vary.
But I think your scheme makes pretty good business sense.
/frogg
Rather than dictating to people what they have to run on their desktops, why not let them choose and support them (within reason) on whatever they've decided to run? Ultimately, the goal is to help them get their jobs done.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100915/09333711025.shtml -- Google engineer fired for spying
These types of people would now be reading your emails.
You're better off installing exim; buying a book and learning its' administration.
Fedora is a beta product! Cent0S is a product for production deployment.
I'd recommend building an action plan detailing the process by which you're going to transition people.
This will require a demonstration environment running in a virtual. Then set up a test network for a control group.
Use Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop for those legacy applications. It'll let you move away from windows on the desktop and keep the "must have" windows applications.
I like gmail better than exchange. They are computer programs that handle emails.
i've worked in the graphic art/advertising IT for the last 15 years, and i've seen my share of unnecessary attempts to eliminate a particular platform that always seem to bite people in the ass...
eliminating the mac for windows seems to be a favorite cost reduction exercise, but this usually ends up failing due several reasons:
1) fonts - font name mapping for postscript type 1&3 and truetype fonts have always been different between windows and mac. many creative departments collect hundreds(adobe font collection alone around 3000) means extra work to rework creative files created on a windows version of adobe illustrator/indesign for output. this can equate to additional charges spent at the printer/color separator/publication. opentype should eliminate this issue, but in the meantime, there are thousands of legacy fonts that designer will be reticent to stop using...
2) initial cost - macs have always had a higher initial cost, but over a three year life span, i've seen fewer macs replaced in the same time period than windows systems(system boards, PS, pci cards, etc). and if you stage your system refreshes(refresh 33% you your systems every year) older macs get rolled down from the heaviest power users(retouchers, motion graphics, 3d) to layout artists, and eventually to utility systems. you'll be migrating systems more frequently, but using a software deploy system like casper or filewave can simplify this tremendously.
3) talent - creative talent prefer working on macs, and more importantly the talented ones are very efficient on the mac platform. consistency of keyboard shortcuts between various applications and OS, interapplication communication to allow intelligent drag-and-drop between apps, the mac is still better at this than windows, and hence, mac artists tend to be more efficient then their windows counterparts. i've never been in a creative/studio/production environment(save for 3d) where the bulk of the work isn't done on the mac. for these folks, it a punishment when they "have" to work in windows.
don't fuck with the creative/mac department.
sales will always be kings when it comes to having their way (with management) about staying with the windows platform in order to use the latest and greatest new sales forecasting tools, performance analysis, PIM's etc. don't even bother fighting this battle, you'll lose and make enemies. if you take away their toys, they'll probably buy their own replacements(laptops, software ,whatever) and end up expensing it somehow.
don't fuck with the sales department.
basically, don't fuck with anyone who is in any revenue stream role. non-revenue generating IT guys will typically lose these battles.
focus on areas that you have control without affecting end user productivity. you don't want to manage an exchange server? there are hosted exchange services that could do it cheaper than you could. have you considered a hosted sharepoint service for document sharing and collaborative work? ... all without purchasing hardware and software(and hiring dedicated personnel). trying to reduce purchases of hardware and software? work with your vendors to get favorable pricing by making them a partner. good vendors are more likely to offer better pricing to return customers, versus non-repeat i'm-looking-for-the-cheapest-price customers. i've also found in the past that when working with a CFO whose interest was to keep capex spending at a minimum, leasing equipment with a dollar buyout agreement at lease termination always won out over outright purchasing, even though the end result was the same. and when it comes time to get rid of old equipment, donate it to a charity, and get a tax break by keeping track of its book value and letting the accountant work their magic.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
Developers have Linux, managers have Windows(XP and some win 7)
No integration issues at all.
People even have choice of either Outlook or thunderbird on Linux via IMAP.
If microsoft had its druthers, then everything is incompatible! Go windows or go home! microsoft guarantees incompatibility! Their stuff won't work with ours! Oh, it does now? Well wait a week and we will get a team on that! After we are done, we guarantee incompatibility for at least a year, maybe more. What's more, if they manage to somehow become compatible, give us a few days and a 'patch release' and BANG, incompatible! And its not our stuff that's bad, NO! Our stuff is the compatibility standard. Blame all those others for not being compatible with us. In fact, microsoft guarantees that our old products are not compatible with our new products. Get a new version of the office suite? But only 2 or 3 people in the office of 50 are using the new version? Well guess what: the new version can "WOO HOO" read the old formats, but the old version can't read the new stuff. Darn! DARN DARN DARN! Oh well, a few hundred grand, 50 new licences and 50 copies of the new stuff and bang! Compatible again! Thanks again microsoft, you sure saved us..... er was that fleeced us. Well, one or the other. Just so long as we don't use any of that other stuff!
I can't speak for Mac OSX, as I have never actually used it. To me it looks a bit too shiny, not like an actual tool, but perhaps that is just me; I haven't had any reason to learn it.
That aside, I do have long experience with making Linux and Windows cooperate. In many ways I think Fedora and Redhat are the least useful of the Linuxes; I have tried most of them (Redhats, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo etc), and Debian has come out on top for me - it's apt that does it for me, and Ubuntu looks too much like a toy (which is not to imply that it is).
It isn't too difficult to cooperate across Linux and Windows, just follow a few, easy rules:
1. Save docs and spreadsheets in "xp format" - ie, don't fall for the docx crap. Openoffice handles doc xp very well, and it is still fine when it is opened on Windows. You can tell openoffice to use that format by default, and presumably you can do the same in Windows.
2. Keep all shared data on genuine linux servers; otherwise you risk having the UNIX user ID and permission flags messed up, since Windows NFS servers don't really know or care.
3. You would in my view be better off putting mail server, DNS etc on Linux. Things are much more easy to script on Linux (AFAIK) and the DNS servers I have seen on Windows are far too cumbersome - GUI only interface, binary files etc. If you've ever set up 1000 addresses only to realise that they should have been prefixed with "xyz", then you know what I mean.
Finally, if you have to get your email served elsewhere, make sure that they allow you to use POP3 or IMAP, so you are not bound to crap like Outlook and Evolution; your life will be happier that way.
There is no way on earth I'd employ someone that is prepared to move corporate communications to GMail where google has the rights to mine those emails for information.. hell if corporate counsel ever used Gmail, they could end up losing their client-attorney protections.
Keep corporate email away from data aggregators that can read all of your most confidential communications.
Let's take an example out of my own history: Say you're the COO of a Corporation with several companies, all organized in a Microsoft directory structure (AD or whatever they call it) over several levels of hierarchy and also different places around the country.
Now you need to schedule a meeting with the CTOs of the companies, plus some of the CEOs, and maybe a handful other people from the administrations. Those people are scattered across the directory.
With Exchange (which I shunned myself before working heavily with it), I can just open my schedule, enter the recipients (with working autocomplete, of course I don't have them in my AB), say I need 1.5 hours of time, and press the free/busy button. I've just made an appointment in about one minute. This works on Windows, OSX and Linux, and is pushed to all mobile devices also.
Now, I am admittedly uninformed about the commercial GMail services, but I'd be amazed if they have free/busy functionality that plays even in the same league. And as the genius submitter probably wants to replace the Windows directory, too, I wish him all of luck, because I really don't think such functionality is easily replaced with F/OSS.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big F/OSS proponent, but I can't imagine it can be feasible, both from a user and financial perspective. This guy just sounds as if he should find another job. He's already beyond his capacity, in several aspects.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Not true. Windows 7 isn't that big a leap to adjust to,made even easier by people already using it at home.
You generally don't find non-IT staff thinking 'what's the easiest to use? I'd better go for linux'. Or, for that matter 'what's the cheapest? I'd better go with Apple'
Install Linux on everything and just say it's Windows 8 Super Ultimate Mega Edition.
All the n00bs will go along with it. And all sane people will too, because they :)
notice it's Linux
If you succeed the migration, you will your job! ;)
A friend of mine tried this with her rather savvy users, but the churn in Fedora created too much work to keep up with. It worked fine, but they ended up switching to Ubuntu LTS for the longer support lifetime, since CentOS 5 was getting a little old. If you prefer the Fedora ecosystem, RHEL 6 was just released, and CentOS 6 will be out soon.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Because Exchange doesn't scale. Because it costs a lot. Because to keep it working you have to work hard. Because to use Exchange on anything other than the CORRECT VERSION of The Blessed Windows, you have to fight it like hell.
And what does it give you in return?
Bugger all.
No
And how often has that happened? Hell, when were you a COO?
You can make up all sorts of complex situations that "just work" but when 99% of the work you do is negatively impacted by Exchange, that 0.00001% of times it's better is pointless.
Funny how "use the best tool for the job" is why you should use Exchange, but NEVER why you should move to something else...
I administer a network which is heterogenous on desktop and server. We run Linux and Windows, and there is the odd OS X system in there for good measure. I will tell you two things:
1. It can be done. Linux, Windows and OS X can all authenticate against an LDAP backend (if you've already got AD, use this), and if you've had the foresight to buy peripherals with wide support (eg. Postscript printers), it's quite possible. If you need centralised management on top of authentication, your best bet is probably group policies with AD, OSes which don't support group policies to authenticate against AD and then pick up their configuration some other way which you may have to cook up yourself - at least in part.
2. Unless you already have a number of good, solid reasons for this which have been discussed and agreed with the business, you probably do not want to do it. Why not? Because the most important, overriding concern you must always have in your mind as a sysadmin is "The Systems must Work"; it follows that anything which may break this is a Very Bad Thing Indeed. You're making a very big change which will almost certainly break that in a number of ways, so unless you've got some serious improvements in mind which necessitate this (and I cannot for the life of me imagine what they'd be - most companies probably don't consider their licensing costs to be a big deal), you are letting yourself in for a world of pain.
Why do I say that? Most Linux distributions (and I include Ubuntu here) are simply not designed to be used on a number of centrally-managed desktops and you'll spend a lot of time getting the configuration just so. It can be done, but the out-of-the-box configuration contains all sorts of stupid things - mostly small things that would be a one-liner and would have no impact on the distribution to fix but haven't been done because so few people are using it in this way - that you'll feel like you spend most of your life fixing tiny idiocies only for another to crop up a few days later. Obviously you can cook up your own scripts which will help hugely, but even then there's a lot you'll have to consider. How will you deal with laptops that only appear on the main network occasionally? Or a desktop PC that was shutdown for a week while someone was on holiday? Wake on LAN is seldom perfectly reliable. Will your scripts account for the risk that such a system might run version 1 of the script, miss three versions then run version 5? How will you deal with people who want to be able to install their own software? Will you give them sudo rights? sudo can be configured to work with LDAP groups, but again it's not an OOTB configuration, you'll have to write your own config files and roll them out.
There's a lot to consider. Don't mistake what you would find interesting for what the business would find interesting.
Here are my thoughts from an end-user in a Fortune 50 company. ... for email in my opinion is overblown unless you talk about hours a day. ... pick up the damn phone and call the person.... geez that's what's wrong with business today.
Most people don't have any understanding of technology and all they want is:
- ability to type in a message
- ability to send it
- ability to get mail
- ability to read it
- ability to forward it
- ability to filter into separate "boxes" upon reception
- ability to print, cut&paste etc
Whether it occurs on Outlook/Exchange or Gmail or something else wouldn't faze them a bit. A hillarious statement that proves my point:
with nearly 80,000 employees, when an errant email goes out and someone sends a REPLY TO ALL with
"Please Unscribe Me "
as the text in their message.
What happens next is the Sunnami... from the technically illiterate (don't get me wrong here, I'm illiterate in areas outside my expertise)
There soon follows hundreds (sometimes several thousand) of duplicates from others asking "Please Unscribe Me"
My point is that in most company's people do not care what technology is used as long as its easy to understand, easy to learn, easy to use.
reliability
If something is that important
Your post is a very good justification of why people should migrate from XP to ... Linux.
The migration to Linux is not more complicated than the migration to Windows 7, but as a side effect, you get free.
To come back to the topic, I think that people should not use Windows Vista or Windows 7 on a desktop, but I do not see the point in binding the OS change to the replacement of Microsoft exchange. The two change should be independent.
When you bind the two changes, you increase the risk of failure and the risk that the exchange replacement failure is interpreted as a Linux failure.
Do not remove Microsoft exchange now. Do it step by step, first get rid of Windows on desktop, then study exchange replacement.
How'd the FUCK did you get that job?!
So many people who actually know what they're doing are out of work, and some wonker like you has to ask /., of all places, how to do your fucking job?
I HATE posts like these. I don't know how to do my goddamned job (and I can't make my own decisions), so let me ask some strangers online.
Dumbass.
If you really want to handle three different OSes then yeah, do so. You really haven't mentioned a single bit of information on how you want them to interoperate however and that's generally the part that's the real pain in the butt. If everyone can be migrated to an OSS office suite then you're good for tossing documents around. Email is an old enough standard that hardly anyone is stupid enough to really break it (even AOL has kind of figured this out). The difficulty there comes in with the scheduling and calendar stuff in Exchange/Outlook. I haven't looked in ages but last I heard there were attempts to replace this with a fully functioning OSS system but it didn't interest me enough to track whether the projects succeeded or not. Samba worked fine with XP, haven't tried it with Windows 7.
Ultimately though you generally do the whole replacement OS thing as a process. You start with the servers. If you're used to in-house mail you might be better off running a Linux or BSD mail server than going the Gmail route. Once you have all the servers done that you're going to do, then start planning out your app deployments and replacements. If you're thinking about swapping out MS Office for OpenOffice, try that before you shuffle OSes. It's free, it works on Windows and it's much easier to back out of if you change your mind (or have it changed for you by your users). Do that with every piece of software you conceivably can, one at a time and see what impact it has. If it all works and no gotchas pop up, you can go on to swap OSes, but I'd probably wait until there was a reason to get rid of Windows 7. When an Antivirus or some other piece of software requires a paid update, switching to Linux or whatever to avoid it will sound like a much better idea. This process will make an eventual OS replacement less painful for you and your users and you won't have to ask Slashdot how well it will work. You'll be seeing it yourself.
So you're taking Google's word then? 6 outages in 8 months does *not* equal 99.9 uptime for a year. I currently provide 99.99% with one Exchange server in a VM and previously it was 99.999% for two consecutive years as a cluster.
In my company's business there's a huge difference between three and five nines of uptime.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Wow mate, I don't know what kind of level of expertise you think you have but I can say you need to revise your estimate downwards.
I suggest that next time you feel the urge to post a technical comment, please give serious consideration to not doing so.
So you're taking Google's word then? 6 outages in 8 months does *not* equal 99.9 uptime for a year. I currently provide 99.99% with one Exchange server in a VM and previously it was 99.999% for two consecutive years as a cluster.
In my company's business there's a huge difference between three and five nines of uptime.
I am far more likely to believe googles exec about his uptime than I am to believe you about yours.
When he says 'switch to gmail' he really means switch to google apps for business. This allows you to use the gmail interface @yourbusiness.com
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html