On Wed, 2002-05-22 at 07:24, Stuart Baird wrote: > In a couple of weeks I'm going to be running a half-day workshop on IT > alternatives for non-profits at a local conference here in Toronto. One of > the main things I will be talking about is our LTSP setup here at ICLEI. It > would be great if I could site other examples of non-profit organizations who > are using LTSP.
I am administrating a small network at a non-profit. At any given time there are about 200 users with 40-60 machines on line.(not all users need all day access to computers). We are replacing an NT network almost completely this summer. After 2 years of running about 10 terminals as email terminals and light duty work stations, we are now ready to migrate fully (exp 3 machines). The reason is simple after pricing the MS path forward it was determined that an upgrade that conservatively would cost 10-15K$ w/o hardware would provide no new necessary features,(necessary being defined as a feature needed to do new things or even make a significant difference in our current productivity). So OpenOffice was chosen to replace Office97 and the whole operation will run off of 3 terminal servers. Yes there will be a learning curve, but in tests most users do not even know what the operating system is or does, so the main thing we learned is... make it easy to find the "office" button, save files, send emails, and print. For the administrator there are now only three machines that matter. If they work they all work barring the occasional hardware (keyboard, mouse, etc) problem. Plus I can work on them and monitor them from home. In a somewhat uninformed environment I would also recommend a hard drive backup system that allows drag and drop replacement of lost or destroyed files. I built one for less the the cost of a tape unit. It is big enough to hold 3 copies of all crucial data, its built on linux w/ rsync. and has paid for itself many times in the 12 months we have run it. Bottom line, for a non-profit with limited cash and limited staff I do not see a better solution out there or I would use it. This is cheap virus free and it works. Tom Possin _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
