[Nottingham]School linux {was Meeting- Wednesday 1st December}

[Duncan John Fyfe]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2004, Steve Dickman wrote:

> I for one would like a discussion on the use of Linux in a small
> office/business environment.
> 
> The main issues, IMHO are :
> 
> - dealing with legacy industry specific DOS and windoze based programs -
> IRIS for accountants etc. there is a raft of stuff out there for lawyers,
> Post offices etc etc. I know of a clothing company that uses a DOS
> program for laying out patterns onto material - they have four DOS based
> PC's just in case one fails - I am trying to use DOSEMU to run this at
> the moment.
>
 	qemu ?

> - Office integration, still not mainstream with OO. Lots of SME's use
> macro based Excel spreadsheets for their accounts and Word templates for
> standard letters. The use of cross-over office still requires a copy of
> Office to be purchased, does anyone know if the server edition shares one
> copy of M$ Office?
>

In many cases this is similar to the legacy issue above.  How do 
you convince them it is a good idea to move from Product 2/6/95/98/...
to something else given that they have built a dependency on that 
software and 'it works'.

Where legacy products are involved:

If their spreadsheets/templates/presentations are simple then it should
not be difficult to translate/reformat with one of OpenOffice, AbiWord,
Gnumeric and re-create simple macros etc.
If on the other hand their files are complex (macros, audio , more than
0 characters ...) then it is likely that Product2000/XP will also
have problems with them.  So make sure you have Product2000/XP 
available on a laptop to prove they will have problems then 
file a bug report against Product and show them what kind of support
they can expect ;)

Where  Product2000/XP are involved:
Get as big a stick as you can find :).

This can also be a subtle game of convincing them to reduce their 
dependence on Products or changing their habits to do things in a more
portable manner before an eventual switch down the road.  Such changes 
can probably be done for perfectly good business reasons.
eg. Why buy a Product licence for every computer when if internal emails
were sent as plain text (pdf's for more graphical ones) then many
fewer licences would be needed at much reduced cost.

[side note] Fiona is having fun with Product (2000 or XP ?) at work atm.
They have a document which crashes said product whenever one tries to 
enter a word beginnig 'rest'.

> - Printers, lots of label, invoice print programs out there as well as
> old printers, some without Linux drivers.
>

How old ?
Many old printers support printing of text (+ control characters)
with inbuilt character/font sets eg:
 	echo "Hairy Hippy" > /dev/lp0
and so don't necessarily need linux drivers.

I still find printers one of Linux's least satisfactory areas.
It is a lot better than it used to be but still quite crap in many
respects.

> - Sage, QuickBooks etc.
>
I know there are free/open software accounts packages out there 
eg. 	http://www.gnucash.org/
 	http://www.geocities.com/kushal_shah123/software/index.html
 	http://www.gnu.org/software/gnue-sb/
 	http://www.weberp.org/
 	http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/accwhizz/


But I have no idea how good/bad/indifferent they are or how they compare
to sage, quicken etc.

Another issue is free/open taxation (checkers, calculators, file with inland
Revenueors) software.

> The rest of the Linux story is great, particularly security, NFS, as well
> as Firefox and Thunderbird - a lot of people do use the calendar function
> of Outlook a lot, so Evolution for them!
>

There are also calendar components for mozilla/firefox/thunderbird
and egroupware.

I think it is worth having an evenings brainstorming over what to 
'sell' to schools , SME's , low/non-profit organizations and how to
convince them Free/open software is good for them.

<rant>
One of my concerns is fragmentation.
Given the three calendars above (evolution, mozilla and egroupware)
how difficult is it to migrate data from one to another ?
They may all be based on open standards which would allow someone to
write a go between but that is not the same as either - the go between
exists - or they are all built on the same standard and all that 
differs is the presentation (and maybe a language binding).
At the development level competition is good (eg gnome vs. kde) but
at the 'sell it to purse strings' end it is less welcome because they 
want to be told 'X is the best tool for the job' not 'choose any X a 
member of set S'.
</rant>

Have fun,
Duncan