Can Windows, OS X and Fedora All Work Together? 375
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? (Score:4, Interesting)
All tied together with the an Active Directory on Server 2003 and an Exchange server.
Realistic Answer: Dumbass (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:hahaha (Score:3, Interesting)
Now the fun part starts: how much would it cost your company to make your mail service as reliable as Gmail? And from the fine article posted by the AC above:
It may sound bad, but Gmail does appear to have a reasonable amount of uptime, all considered. Following last fall's series of outages, a Google rep told the IDG News Service that Gmail suffers only about 10 to 15 minutes of downtime per month, giving it an average uptime rate of 99.9 percent. He noted that, according to some independent reports, on-premise e-mail systems tend to see twice the amount of offline time--anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes, on average, every 30 days.
Is Gmail for everyone? No, but it certainly is worth looking at for some companies.
Why, why, why???? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:+1 million, insightful (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds good, until you have that old application running on an old OS that doesn't work with any of your new management frameworks, procedures, new clients apps, etc. Then you're really screwed and a migration is much more painful and costly than it needs to be.
Actually, I believe the FOSS world is much WORSE than Microsoft in this area. Microsoft is a slave to backwards compatibility. With many FOSS applicaitons/frameworks/whatever, if you're not running a very current release, you're basically hosed when it comes to security patches, interoperability, community support, etc. One only has to visit the forums of any popular FOSS software solution to see this in action:
Q: I'm seeing this bug on version 2.3.34 of foozywhatzit. Anybody know of a workaround?
A: 2.3.34? That's ancient. It was released more than three months ago! Download the latest source tree, apply these seventeen patches found in random places all over the internet, hand-edit makefiles to allow compilation on Tuesdays on systems with SATA hard disks, and then recompile, and then fix the install scripts for your environment, and then run make install. Noob.
In reality, it's a lot cheaper to stay on the upgrade path for both commercial and FOSS software, skipping a version here or there but not falling more than two years or so behind.
Re:Why? (Score:1, Interesting)
It's really really sad how bad calendaring is outside of Outlook (not that outlook is all that good). It makes me cry a little bit. In particular managing invitations and seeing schedules. Nothing else I've seen comes close.
I almost wish I still worked in a dark room and the only meetings I ever had involved my boss coming into the room and pointing at me.
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just, like, your opinion, man.
I despise the ribbon. Why? Because I'd rather spend my time doing work or commenting on slashdot instead of learning a new UI when the old one is in my fucking muscle memory.
I despise using a mouse when keyboard shortcuts work well... and the ribbon killed many, many keyboard shortcuts.
Here's the thing about the ribbon: for beginners, it's easier from the get-go. For intermediate users, it's worth the switch. For expert users of the menu-driven old UI? Not worth it... those users will never be faster and more productive with the ribbon then they were under the old UI. Any time spent learning the ribbon UI is time that is 100% wasted.
Of course they can ... that's the wrong question (Score:3, Interesting)
You haven't provided anywhere near enough information to give useful advice. What are you trying to accomplish? What are the users doing? What tools are they using (releases count), etc. Who would be using Linux and why (if it's going to be low cost windows replacements, then perhaps rehink your choice of distribution...)
You need to trade off budget, vs. requirements vs. desiderata .. it's why IT is a profession not a hobby ;>
As to the question you asked, if you keep things on Exchange, and CIFS everyone can share. If you migrate to IMAP based servers everyone can share, except for calendaring (outlook's Calendar features are not the same as what you get with Google Apps, so be careful what you threaten your user community with).
How do Sales and Marketing communicate? What do they need to collaborate on? If it's just PDF documents from Marketing->Sales then the question is pretty meaningless. If they need to coauthor documents you might have very different Requirements.
Personally I work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment, and sometimes use personal Macs attached. Engineering is CentOS based, my Linux laptop is Ubuntu, my Windows laptop is XP and my Windows VM inside of the Ubuntu environment is Win7u. Macs are aged PPC based devices.
Depending on just what you are trying to share and WHY makes all the difference ... but it can be done. Trivially in many cases; less so in others.
As others aptly noted, taking Excel away from power users is seldom a successful strategy.
Use Gmail - go to Jail?! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)