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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.)"
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."
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.....
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.