Dear List, I have a small consultancy and finance company that is just about to get bigger, and hire more people, mainly contractors. I want to set up a standard IT operating environment, with minimal software and maintenance costs, that is fully legal. Since I've been using unix-like OSs since VMS died, of course I want to use a linux setup, and since I'm a start-up I simply cannot afford to pay more for software than I absolutely have to.
OK, you say, no problem, just use a linux variant and OpenOffice 3.0. But my experience is that this is not as easy as it sounds. OpenOffice 3.0 still has significant limitations when working with people from the Microsoft world, and that is unavoidable. One thing that we do often is exchange files, for example legal documents, with clients. Business etiquette is to exchange editable files, not PDFs. Even though OpenOffice 3.0 sort of deals with .doc/.docx etc files, there are many formatting issues (styles do not agree, highlight/track changes systems differ, numbering formats do not agree, formatting of certain fonts is poor, spacing/kerning is sometimes wrong, nested tables do not work, complex tables sometimes do not work, maths formulae are awful, opentype fonts probably don't work). Opening a client's MicrosoftOffice file in OpenOffice is often a horrible experience! Many such small issues still dog excel, powerpoint, pdfedit (unacrobatic), inkscape (vector file manipulation headaches) and gimp (CMYK clumsiness). These problems are soluble, but at *significant* cost of time. For myself, this is usually not an issue (I used latex and fortran/C code for much of what I do) but for staff and contractors its a pain. Although I'm willing to train new staff, I cannot really expect people on a 6 month contract with me retool their computer skills. Right now, my solution is to give everyone a fedora 10 computer with OpenOffice 3.0 and have one windows PC with MicrosoftOffice and one Apple Mac available for those occasions when there is no alternative. That way I only have to pay for one full set of commercial software. If staff want to use (and pay for) commercial software themselves, I give them VirtualBox on top of fedora - this works well except for certain usb devices and monitors. So I'd like to ask please: 1. How have others solved this problem? Is anyone out there running a small (5-50) person company working exclusively or almost exclusively in a linux environment? If so, how do you deal with exchanging files with customers/clients/partners/suppliers? 2. Does anyone use a paid-for open source system (RHEL/Novell etc) in this situation? If so, how well does it work? If the paid-for system lags OpenOffice, what are the issues with just updating OpenOffice? 3. Of the many bulletin boards and usenet-type forums out there, which is considered the best for users ranging from newbies to sysadmins to ask questions of? ie which are the most comprehensive and fastest to reply? 4. How would you sync the computer+phone calendars of 10 people using the same linux software and the same mobile phone? 5. I use claws-mail and am tempted to force this upon all my users. Can anyone suggest anything better? (I want my outlook users to go "oh, that's nice, I'm going to switch over...") Many thanks for your input, Wilfred _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
