[ILUG] Office migrations to Linux

[Aidan Delaney]

On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 08:51 +0100, Glen Gray wrote:
> Has anyone done anything on this before ?
Kinda, I've done it (with Debian) in a school.  The major difference is
that I could use Abiword instead of OpenOffce.org.

> There's a small company office that we have dealings with and they seem
> to be suffering from outdated technology and malware infestations. They
> are all running on Dell Celereon machines (300-400MHz) and 64MB RAM.
> They are a typical small office using Outlook for email and Word/Excel
> etc.
I'm assuming that they're all networked.  My thinking on this would be
to install Fedora on all client machines.  Run Evolution and Firefox
(definatly FF, not Epiphany or Konqueror) locally but run OpenOffice.org
on a beefed up server.

> Moving to Linux wouldn't really suit the current hardware setup. They'll
> need more RAM per machine which may alleviate the issue. Getting email
> and contacts out of Outlook might be tricky. But the biggie is that they
> use TAS Books 2 for accounts. Anyone know if that runs under Wine ?
They'll only need more RAM if they're running OO.o, however TAS Books
will be a pain in the ass.  They don't seem to support Linux and I know
this problem has come up before.  I suggest approaching them and telling
them that your company will have to consider other options if there is
no Linux version of Tas.

> I may just setup a sample office machine for them and try it all out
> myself. Then they can have a look and see if they'd be happy. 
Always a good idea.

> I guess I'll have to think carefully about what distro to use. I have a
> personal preference for Gnome and was thinking maybe of Ubuntu or
> Fedora. But I may try Yoper and SUSE too. In fact, Novel Linux Desktop
> will be out soon too so that might be a contender.
Go with a distro with a track record.  Ubuntu is nice, but so was Gentoo
when it first started (I hate Gentoo now and can't get rid of it due to
a broken CD-ROM).  SuSE Personal is free, if all your stuff is available
with personal, try it.  Do not compile from source or make major changes
to the configuration of the distribution.  This only leads to problems
with maintenance.  I personally would try Fedora, SuSE and Mandrake in
that order.  If none of them suited I'd try Cobind (www.cobind.com) as
it's Fedora based.  Whilst I love Debian on my servers, I've found that
Debian (and Debian based products) suck on the desktop, for a variety of
reasons.

-- 
Aidan Delaney   email: adelaney at cs.may.ie
                web:   http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney
                gpg:   http://www.cs.may.ie/~adelaney/public_key.asc
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