[Nottingham] Migration (was Jobs in Open Source?)

[David Bean]

OK, so we have a network of 500 computers (Win2k) and 600 computer
users. Email and group ware is currently handled by Exchange 2000 but an
upgrade is due any time now.

There are applications which need to be run on Windows. Some of these
can be run on a server with a Terminal services connection. (from any
platform?)

There is also a ICL Mainframe which uses VT320+ terminals on the client
side.

So if every application which requires windows was put on a server with
Terminal services we would be left with a lot of Windows PC's with
Terminal services clients and MS Office Premium (Word, Excel, Publisher,
Powerpoint, Access). This is what we could replace with Linux/Open
Office PC's.

Current documents are stored in one of these office formats, and would
need (at least) read only access to them (if they could be converted).

We are a Local Government organisation so cannot sack staff who are not
familiar with anything but Windows (most of them), we would have to
retrain them.

Knowing my boss, if I were to propose a GNU/Linux solution, he would
want a demonstration. 


What do I demo?
 - A Home brew distribution
 - Some current distribution of Linux
 - Windows and OpenOffice.org
 - Windows and StarOffice
 - Something else


David Bean