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German Foreign Office Going Back To Windows
vbraga writes "The German government has confirmed that the German Foreign Office is to switch back to Windows desktop systems. The Foreign Office started migrating its servers to Linux in 2001 and since 2005 has also used open source software such as Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice on its desktop systems. The government's response to the SPD's question states that, although open source has demonstrated its worth, particularly on servers, the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers, and of training, have proved greater than anticipated. The extent to which the potential savings trumpeted in 2007 have proved realizable has, according to the government, been limited – though it declines to give any actual figures. Users have, it claims, also complained of missing functionality, a lack of usability and poor interoperability."
Switzerland and Spain are doing great with OSS in government. What makes linux a bad match for the German Foreign Office? Or what are they doing wrong?
While it's very likely that Microsoft-addicted users complained, I am absolutely certain that no resources were spent on "writing printer and scanner drivers", thus making the whole claim untrustworthy.
Someone has to be investigated for corruption -- IIRC, in Germany it actually something that matters.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
We have scanners and printers running no problem in our office on Ubuntu. Why exactly does he mention having to program printer and scanner drivers?
Now I'm just throwing this out there, but it might be possible that there's more then one printer company that makes more than one type of printer so that there might exist in one of the foreign offices of the German government a printer of a make and model which isn't the exact same as yours?
I work at a university campus library, we're a tiny little outfit (a mere 140 staff). However we deal with public service as well as maintaining fairly sophisticated servers for the collections and providing cafe-style computer access to students.
140 staff, another 100 student accessible machines. All are running windows, and those licenses run us $0. This is partly because the people in charge won't allow buying anything but IBM (lenovo) which means that all computers come with windows. The other part of it is Microsoft giving us the software we need free because they want people hooked.
We have $64,000 in printers, $34,000 of which need to be replaced if we switch to linux, another $10,000 that should be replaced as support is existent but spotty. (I went through all of this when I tried to get a switch happening).
Without going into staff training or anything else, that means a cost of at least $34,000 (around $250 per staff) in printers to switch to linux. I assure you that printers are a big part of linux's problem in the workplace.
Is it unfair to linux that the extra cost of buying lenovo desktops can't be factored in (I could by locally for about half the price)? Yes.
Is it unfair to linux that Microsoft gives away software (and developers to manufacturers) where needed to make the switch to linux harder to sell? A little, but that's business.
Does it matter? No.
The simple fact is that as much as I do like linux, Microsoft isn't lying when they say it's more expensive in the workplace. They're being slightly underhanded, but not lying.
In other words: They are able to do their jobs now with what they have and you want to "help" them continue doing their jobs by making them learn something new.
I made money modernizing offices, and the attitude you have shown is counter-productive.
The number one error that office managers seem to make is buying a PC with a word processor and a spreadsheet program and installing it on each employee's desk. After which they instruct the employee to learn how to use it, and quickly go to their superior and brag about how they modernized the office. The mistake being that no effort was made to understand why the employee was so productive, and giving the employee a general purpose tool to replace what they were accustomed to using. This results in the employee having to learn something new "to make someone else's job easier" and the employee "knowing" that the office manager is trying to make himself indispensable by introducing something into the workplace that only he understands.
In one of the offices that I "modernized" there was an employee that used a typewriter to keep up with the inventory. It worked flawless for him, and since the trucks arrived very early in the morning, he had all workday to do the tallies. He would white out the totals and add new truckloads to the bottom of the list, cross out the truckloads that were no longer at the warehouse, add up all the numbers, and put a new total at the bottom of the list. He would then make photocopies of his "master list" and send them to the other office workers. He did this every day for the past 15 years, and he was able to do all this quickly (much faster than I thought possible). I was able to "win him over" by creating a specialized spreadsheet application that allowed him to continue to work the way he was accustomed to, and he saw that the instantaneous totals made his job easier. The key was to make the software conform to the worker.
Today I see the reverse being done. Terminals that had forms that the data entry clerk could quickly fill in are being replaced with window machines running software that don't even come close to being the same thing. Worse I've seen terminals being replaced by windows machines running terminal emulators. This shows a lack of thought by IT. No wonder employees despise them. Of course IT people are accustomed to windows, so they don't see why the employees are so problematic...
I did this all in the 80's when personal computers in the office were new. I'd thought people would have it easier today.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...