In addition to my main job training planning commissions in remote arctic villages, I serve as IT chief for my employer, a local governemnt with a 39,000 square mile jurisdiction. We moved from MAC to PC platforms slowly over the past few years, with a lot of help from InfoMagic WorkGroup Server. Micro$oft surprises kept cropping up, becoming progressively LESS compatible with Server Message Block (Samba) with each upgrade. Now we have 98 not Y2K ready, NT version 4 going to Service Pack 5 and STILL not Y2K ready, and Windows 2000 some sort of Beta3 hardly available vaporware, at least for server apps, and the Workstation version I have seen won't talk to the WorkGroup Server we have. The deadline is upon us. I told my employer I would need 3 months of testing and three months implementation time for Y2K compliant software if any major technology shifts were involved. Well, Micro$oft is 14 days overdue on my deadline and shows us nothing we can rely on. I am sure to be fired if I don't have something Y2K compliant running Dec. 31. Introducing the new, improved, "wave of the future", the all-Linux Office. For reliability reasons, we will begin with Festen. No dual-boots, lots of backwards compatibility, and files compatibility with the last few MACs that will be removed from service this month. As it now appears, the conversion task for files is LESS from win9x to Linux than it would be to NT 4 or NT 5 / windows 2000. Most of our users have email, lookup over www/wais, and word-processing with a minor use of spreadsheets. StarOffice is our likely target with a continuing evaluation of the appropriate time to migrate to KOffice. So, instead of a score card like this: Micro$oft 2000 Users 0 We have Microsoft -15 Linux +17 Users=winners Cheers, Civileme
