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Why Munich Will Stick With Linux
Jason Hibbets writes: "There are many solved problems in open source. Groupware is not one of them," Georg Greve, co-founder and CEO of Kolab System starts off his post highlighting recent features of the latest release of the Kolab groupware project. He calls out a few newly elected politicians that don't like the current set-up, but says that thousands of users don't have the same experience. "Until today, the city of Munich is using the same stand-alone calendaring and email systems it had used when it was still fully operating on Windows. Updating these systems had a lower priority than the migration to LiMux then. But an upgrade is underway now. And, the solution they chose is agnostic to the desktop platform and will service LiMux and Windows alike. The primary difference made by another migration would likely be due to the perils that come with any migration, such as additional costs and delays. In other words: The very problem used to criticize the LiMux desktop is already being solved."
It all reads like an ad for Kolab.
This space for rent.
Already going back.
I'm all for GNU/Linux as much as everyone else, but Windows still has the compatibility card. You can't easily exchange documents with GNU/Linux and expect it to work. Fonts will be different. Style sheets will be different.
It's funny but Android is actually a better option since Office is available for it.
They should teach these people how to install linux on their home computers too. It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two (linux in the office, windows at home). Maybe even give them a free linux laptop for the home. They can afford that because of the license fee savings for not using windows.
no, I don't have a sig
It's amazing! IT issues getting fixed... I thought programmers just liked to make things worse. Who da thunk it?
There is actually one problem with opensource and that is that your organization will be attacked by proprietary companies that are freaking out. But this problem can be turned into an asset. The idea is to identify the ways that the proprietary companies manage to insinuate themselves and eliminate those paths. So if an organization suddenly finds a few of their IT people cheerleading some company like Microsoft, then there should be a thorough investigation as to how they have been turned, was it "free" training? Was it some new head of IT who needs to be removed?
Then these tactics need to be published so that other organizations can watch for these fifth column attempts and whatnot.
Often with these situations the company will have salesmen who have commissions well in excess of 1%. So if they can lie, cheat, bribe, or blackmail their way into a organization-wide sale then they could be looking at commissions well into the millions.
And this is where Open Source generally has a huge weakness; no sleazy salesmen. But that is also where it is very attractive. Most heads of organizations hate how much time they have to waste fending off sleazy salesmen doing underhanded attempts to end run them. Either through the ground floor (converting some IT people) or going over their heads through a board of directors. And never mind those situations where one company will insist that in order to do business with them that they are a "Microsoft Shop" only. So they will do something like insist on work orders be placed through an outlook only system or some stupid sharepoint crap.
If I were in charge of something like the city of Munich I would put out a memo that says, "If you talk to a large software vendor then your continued employment is unlikely."
Whereas I appreciate the beauty of OpenSource, I am yet to find a compelling MS Access equivalent in the Linux world. Yes, I know about Kexi, MariaDB, OpenOffice Base and the like.
But let's face it: There's nothing in the Linux world that can compare to MS Access. Nothing! I am not just trolling. I have developed hundreds small scale MS Access implementations for many clients.
VB, even with its quirks, does well. I would like a front-end, in which business logic can be programmed. Logic placed right there on the form...Logic and parameters that can be passed to the DB engine. Nothing friendly exists in Lunix, or should I say, "I haven't found one yet." Am I wrong?
My experience is that when new versions of Word have problems opening a file created by a previous version, the solution is to open them in OpenOffice and use OO to save to the newest MS Word format (or leave them as odt).
In that way, OpenOffice has BETTER compatibility with various types of MS Word documents than MS Word itself does.
> It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two
Yep. Pretty much everything I own runs Linux, so no matter what device I'm working on the shell interface is the same. On my phone I use the graphical interface most of the time, of course, but I _can_ open a command line and find out what's using al my storage space it just the same as I would on my work desktop, my laptops, my server, my NAS, my PBX, and anything else I own.
At my 8-5 job, the company-owned machine has the same bash shell, which works the same way, running on an OSX kernel instead.
...is that linux on the desktop is dead...has been...will forever be.
Perhaps you live in the real world, and not some MS simulation.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
They can afford that because of the license fee savings for not using windows.
The geek has been running this tired old nag around the track since 1995. It was a bullshit argument then and it is a bullshit argument now.
The price of the mass market OEM system install is and always has been a trivial part of the expense of owning a home PC. There will be the monthly bills for broadband services, the expense of consumables like ink and paper...
It's less confusing to have one os (all linux) than two (linux in the office, windows at home.
The home user has different needs and values than the office worker --- to say nothing of the office manager. These markets began to diverge as early as the introduction of the Apple II and with the introduction of Windows 95, the divide had become a chasm as broad as the Grand Canyon.
The home market is a tough nut to crack - and it isn't just about the games.
The 4K monitor at a mass market prices implies the sale of 4K HDTVs and 4K HD videos --- HEVC encoded ---- at a mass market price.
There will never be an explicit plan to go back to MS. There are too many egos involved - heads may roll if this is perceived as anything other than a huge success. Remember this is a government bureaucracy with all the inherent office politics. It could get embarrassing.
I'm sure they have made provisions for people who absolutely need to use MS products. If they ever want to go back to windows, they will expand the use-case requirements for a windows PC until over time, it becomes a checkbox on a form for new employees.
Desktops are large, clunky, loud, too many wires, too much power consumption, chassis that takes too much space. People are indeed moving towards mobile devices including tablets plus gaming could be done on a console. Windows 8 is basically made to work in both worlds and I love it, linux runs like shit on laptops/tablets plus overheats these devices. Working from 8 to 14 hours a day at my work desk and I don't want to come home and watch, play games, or listen to music on my desktop sitting down while I can do this on a console or go to a park, relax, and watch some movies off of my phone or tablet. Desktops have become overrated and the majority of the world does not need them.
Linux is more of a headache to handle than windows, governments should definitely adopt windows 8 technology based mobile devices it will make things a lot easier.
It's a pity they killed Google Wave, it had great potential to become THE enterprise groupware, offering whatever Outlook ever had or will but powerful and oriented towards knowledge sharing. It also was designed to be federated, which meant users from different servers (companies) could share wavelets.
Today there is a major IT company moving from email to a Wave-like product, bluekiwi, which is proprietary and isolated (no federation). It has very similar goals as Wave (to share information between users and build knowledge interactively), but much more limited: it cannot be expanded easily as Wave.
Google lost an opportunity by releasing Wave too early and without a clear view on its target. They thought it would be the replacement of email and social networks, but the perfect fit for it was the enterprise groupware. They would have killed Outlook and Exchange with a much better product. Maybe this vision did not fit their business, gathering data from users, and that's what killed it. What a shame.
Now it is a stagnant project with bad name and nobody knows they want it.
Somebody creates some MS-Access app that the company comes to rely on, then that person leaves.
Nobody knows the code, or even the password. When you have to upgrade that desktop, you may find yourself in a difficult situation.
You are going to have issues with setting up access rights, and many other problems.
IMO: put databases on the server, where they belong.
That said: it's true, MS-Access is a much better desktop database than anything offered in Linux.
There are NO show stoppers in Linux.
Proprietary vendors will LOCK you.
Casteism