[Gllug] is this a big problem?

[Mike Brodbelt]

paul wrote:

> but in the real
> world many offices are using
> Windows servers and their practices reflect that.

A fact that escapes many open-source advocates.... Microsoft actually
puts a lot of effort into producing software that plays well in a
corporate network environment - most open source stuff takes a lot more
effort to manage.

> They pay hundreds (if not
> thousands) of pounds a year to Microsoft in license fees

It'll be thousands or tens of thousands, in most cases....

> and other costs but
> we are
> trying to find ways of reducing their costs without making overnight radical
> changes to the setup.

You can reduce costs substantially by using Linux/BSD on the servers.
Samba as a fileserver can remove the need for Windows CALs, and makes
sense. You can get a good AD equivalent with Samba 3 and OpenLDAP,
without too much hassle.

As far as mail goes, there are some Linux based groupware solutions, but
they're not all free software. You can get decent email and half decent
calendaring with Thunderbird and Mozilla calendar on the clients, and an
IMAP server (my preference is Cyrus, YMMV) and Apache/mod_dav for
storage of the calendar data.

> I was just looking into this problem for the first
> time and found
> there was no info on the web that was as good as the feedback I got here -

Google for "real men don't click" - it's a pretty good site that may
give you some ideas in terms of Windows desktop management using open
source stuff.

As far as desktop software goes, Firefox/Thunderbird are pretty good
(though very annoying to deploy). They'll save you money in avoided
scurity incidents. OpenOffice can be used as an MSO replacement for some
users, though I'd advise extreme care with it - many of it's features
just aren't a credible replacement for MS Office at the moment.

Mike.
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