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.)"

Comments

Stupid idea

[SolidAltar]

This is a stupid idea and you're stupid for considering it.
Not posting Anonymously.

Re:why?

[davepermen]

congrats for failing. the ribbon is great. but mostly those "20 years in business and i can't get my head around new things anymore so i have to diss it massively" guys are why people still think it's stupid. but yeah, as an it guy, you would have to sit down, spend a bit of time, read up on it, especially on the WHY, and then be there for your customers, when they ask. once you know WHY it is how it is, you will love it. but old grumpy it guys that forgot that it is about change, about new stuff, about revolution sometimes, they are a massive blockade today. and sadly, most of them sit in the higher positions of businesses.

Re:Why?

[jez9999]

BS is outlook 2010 better. They have the godawful ribbon in there (which they keep changing about, by the way, so good luck trying to remember any keyboard shortcuts), you can't do inline replies to non-plaintext quoted e-mails, and you basically send a Word document instead of an e-mail; good like trying to read it outside of another outlook client.

It sucks.