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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.)"
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.