Holy doodle . . .
BSA/Microsoft attempt a shakedown on a company and after the current inept CFO, CEO, and IT Department are laid off the new CEO tells BSA/Microsoft to take a flying flip off a rolling donut.
By Monday at 8 AM, all desktop units would be Linux, as would be the server(s). No one had been told of the switch. This was not a democratic process and to get this done in such a short time, we had no time for the bickering that would surely take place upon the news that the system would be switched. This would be the first “Monday Morning Surprise”. There would be at least 8 more in 8 different cities if this worked out.
We had 81 physical desktops to change and to do so, we had a massive amount of data to back up. Here is the sweet spot…the one concrete circumstance that allowed me to be a part of this migration.
Ninety percent of our applications are web-based. Accounting was the biggest and most important application involved, as I suppose it is with any company. This application being web-based alone made the entire process almost giggly easy. Our main concern for that evening was was backing up the network folders and the data within.
Part 1:
No One Ever Got Fire For Using Microsoft. Yes They Did . . .
Part2:
One Small Business Gladly Gives Microsoft The Boot
This rings a bell. Oh yes, 3 years ago. The guitar string company, Ernie Ball, had the same BSA/Microsoft shakedown (precipitated by Caldera aka The SCO Group) and went over to LTSP pdq also. (LTSP = Linux Terminal Server Project. Boot the desktops from the server, no local disks but you do have the option to use the local cpu for running the actual apps, so it isn’t quite the same as Xterms)
This is only going to happen more and more, now that web based applications are becoming the key business app aside from email. So long as the business critical web apps are not IE{4/5/6} specific . . . this is going to happen more and more frequently.
Edit: March 15, 2007 and no further updates to be seen. Helios has gotten mired in the tarpit of obsessing over Novell/Microsoft. Sigh.
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