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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.)"
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.
> Life is easy with Gmail.
That is, until your company is using Gmail and you are the one in charge of IT. Even when you pay Google instead of using the free service, frequent outages of a few minutes are excluded from Gmail SLA (and they happen often!) and as the IT guy you end up being overwhelmed by angry people asking you what is going on... while having no control at all, except refreshing a blog page on some Google server to see if there is more info regarding the duration of the outage.
Gmail is ok for a small business that does not rely on email, but the support model is not ready for bigger environments.
lucm, indeed.
GMail was more expensive over 5 years than Exchange was, so we kept with Exchange (2010, in our case). Our spam filter is quite effective, and barely needs to be touched. Exchange 2003 was extremely hands off, and now having implemented 2010 I don't see how it's going to be any different. It works well with Windows and OS X via Office 2010/2011, and the Linux users (Ubuntu, Debian) are all content with Outlook 2010 via Citrix XenApp. As for pushing Linux on people; right tool for the right job. Trying to get CS to run in WINE is borderline incompetent if you're using it for business to facilitate the money-making process. Sure, it may be good fun at home, but there's no place for that shit in a business. Windows does the general office crap fine, so we use it. Linux does the engineering/compute stuff fine, which is why we use it. OS X does the marketing/sales/creative crap just great, so we use it. They all integrate into Active Directory easily, so I don't see why giving employees choice is a problem, provided you have a competent IT staff.