[Sussex] 92 Members

[Tony Austin]

Stuart

Welcome to the LUG.

>> 92 members, this doesn't seem very many for a big county.  Is everyone
>
>> actively recruiting members or is it assumed that new members will
>> find their own way onto the list?
>
> Well, this is probably a good time to introduce myself, I found my way
> on to the list just before Christmas, thanks to Matt Macdonald-Wallace
> for pointing me in the right direction. I've been messing about with
> various versions of *nix since Interactive Systems V1 way back in 1981.
> I run a micro-consultancy down here in Billingshurst, we're committed to
> the open-source way of doing things in general, Linux and open-office in
> particular. I'd love to do more with it, but clients often mandate a
> Microsoft solution :-(
>

It is hard to get people away from the Microsoft.  I have a customer that
has both an Exchange Server and a SquirrelMail Linux mail server.  They
like both and don't like M$ and would like to get away from having to use
M$; we have been talking for some time about ditching the Exchange Server
and putting everyone on a Linux mail solution and then they said to me
"yes, but we will have to keep M$ Outlook because everyone knows how to
use it".  Now, I thought I had explained enough for them to know that
there are plenty of options for mail clients (I have showed them many of
them) and then they come up with something like that!  I thought we were
friends!  I have explained how they can still use their shared calendars,
shared folders, etc with SquirrelMail/Linux but not the ones on the
Exchange Server but all it's about is what it looks like and that everyone
"knows" Outlook.  Well I know they don't know Outlook, otherwise they
wouldn't be asking me the questions about it that they do and, what's
more, when they come to upgrade from OL2000 to OL2003 (or whatever it's
called) they will know even less - so they might as well change to
something completely different, like a Linux solution!

No, I haven't given up on them.

I also have a group of their users on OOo (don't tell them I said so, but
they are not the brightest users) and they have been using it for about 6
months now.  They say they hate it and they want M$ Office97 back, but so
far they haven't come up with anything that has taken me longer that 15
minutes to sort out - usually just by using the Help function!  (Actually,
I have to admit that OOo was really slow on their Celeron 333s, but then
we didn't try M$ Off2000 on those machines either.)

Knowing how to sell Linux and Open Software solutions is quite an art at
this stage, I believe.  I am not going to mention how much money it saves
to the "workers", only to the "bosses", as the "workers" just think they
are being palmed of with second best, without even looking at what they
get.  If there is one thing I am good at, it's making mistakes.  At
another client, the FD was really keen to try OOo so I put it on his
machine but left M$ on, two weeks later without asking a single question
he insisted that I took it off because he was having trouble with some
documents page breaking in different places.  I suppose I have should have
explained to him sooner that he could always have open the documents in M$
Word, but it never occurred to me that he would not have realised this
himself.

Such are the (ludicrous) pitfalls of trying to convert people to Linux
solutions.

> Just a brief hello.
>
> Regards
>
> Stuart Box
> http://www.burningsuit.co.uk


Regards.

Tony Austin
Gigaday Computing Limited
http://www.gigaday.com
tony at gigaday.com



"Well, it's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July of this country.  It means what these words say, for starters.  The great inalienable rights of our country.  We're blessed with such values in America.  And I -- it's -- I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values."

George W. Bush
July 2, 2001
Spoken during a visit to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.