Swiss Canton Abandons Linux Migration 442
An anonymous reader writes "The Swiss canton Solothurn has put a stop to their ongoing migration to Linux. [Original, in German.] The project started in 2001, and has been under harsh public criticism ever since. The responsible CIO resigned this summer. Solothurn plans to convert all desktop computers to Windows 7 in 2011."
translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Informative)
but it seems like this migration was rather ill prepared...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Even if the baker has no more croissants, will the system with the trademark penguin almost made responsible Bader resulted in this conversation continues," the newspaper quoted the person responsible for the migration.
I don't think you can blame linux for this one. If that's the closest the CIO can come to a coherent thought, they had no chance. In fact, they probably should sack the person responsible for hiring the CIO. They would have been better off hiring a bunch of llamas.
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The article said they actually started the project in 2006, the decisicion to do so way have been made in 2001, but that isn't all that relevant.
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, Google Translate get's it wrong. The article actually only says that certain *parts* of the project were delayed till 2006:
Which roughly translates to:
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>in the meantime they deploy web-based email software instead of Outlook, and Openoffice version which apparently wasn't able to run presentations, I don't know who's to blame here.
Sounds like they did things bassbackwards. When migrating to Linux, it should be a two step process:
- Switch to all open-source apps (OpenOffice, Firefox, etc) while still using the familiar Windows environment
- Then switch to open-source a year or two later, while still keeping the same apps
Step 1 is where the real cost savings come from (imho)
.
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They've been fucking around with it for almost 10 years.
I don't get it. We're working on try to fix a Windows workgroup network put together by a bunch of amateurs. How any Linux network could end up in worse shape than this mess is a mystery to me.
On the tech side we're using Ubuntu laptops and ClearOS on the network. The only problems we experience are the Windows clients though that's related to the history of poor administration.
If you have your network set up right the client OS doesn't matter
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If that's the case, why are they moving to Win7 instead of just fixing their issues with Linux deployment?
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:5, Informative)
Because the press has blamed Linux for everything (including things which clearly are not Linux's fault), and they couldn't withstand the public pressure any more. Note that 80% of the users were satisfied with the new desktop, and a further 10% just complained about transient problems.
Need to tag the article for future reference. (Score:3, Interesting)
To see if in the next 3 years they report a massive increase in the number of malware infections.
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I have to say, that's pretty disappointing.
These companies and its bosses have to grow some. If I was a boss, or it was my own company, I'd implement Linux. Period. If people complained, they can get either accept it or get the hell out.
I'm not talking about serious stuff, but for basic office purposes, if you really can't figure out it out, I wouldn't want that person as an employee.
This isn't 1995 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency in computing skills, compared to users past.
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
If I was a boss, or it was my own company, I'd implement Linux. Period. If people complained, they can get either accept it or get the hell out.
Try that style in public management and you'll be on the street before you even got to sit in your office chair. In the private sector, you can often be a hardliner because of the bottom line says you're profitable, nobody say how you should run this business (or LOB, division, department) because you know that best. Public offices often deliver quite intangible services which generally aren't charged to the customers like a private company would. And when it comes to private companies, in practice it's a very narrow chain of command to argue with.
In the public sector, very often your job is to justify the number of employees and your budget necessary. Why do we need X people and X million dollars to run a city planning office? And everybody from the press to politicians to interest organizations will butt in on the process. In the end it doesn't matter how efficient you run, it's how efficient it seems to be run. You could run an extremely tight ship with ten people and a $1 million budget but if you've given the impression this can be solved by a handful people on a shoestring budget, you will fail. While if you've convinced them that it really takes 50 men and a $10 million budget, you're golden.
Particularly when it comes to politicians, they are press tools more than anything. If the press requests a comment on their "outrageous Linux spending" then 99 out of 100 politicians will find a way to put themselves on the attacking end as they seem aggressive against government bloat and wasted money, which everybody agrees there's too much of. Very few want to stand up for the project and say this is money well spent, because they know there'll be little proof to show they're right. I'm sure you've figured by now that TCO studies can be written to give pretty much the concolusion you want, so you can end up with a political diaster that "everyone" agrees was a bad decision. The kind of studies Microsoft loves to pay for and whoever punched through Linux can't afford.
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If Linux geuninely gas higher TCO, perhaps adjusted for intangible employee morale, then obviously you shouldn't transition. I can't fathom the incompetence it'd take to have higher costs when moving to Linux for basic office jobs, though. One can have pretty much one or two images that take care of all desktops, they can run a streamlined desktop environment, etc.
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't fix stupid.
No amount of access to technology will solve these problems for 100% of the population. On the other hand it's completely legal to not hire those boneheads. Seem whoever Mr. Bitter here works for is part of the stupid. I feel sorry for the kid.
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To add to this point, although age is a factor, the real difference is a willingness to understand, learn and adapt. A fair number of youngish people I encounter simply don't have the attention span or interest to learn the various systems, and a lot of older people, while they have the attention span, just don't seem willing to learn or understand. They want you to tell them all the steps so they can follow them, without having an understanding of the concepts involved.
Personally I think that the truth i
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Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
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>>>5 year olds can use Linux/GNOME/OpenOffice. So what's the problem with adults?
Their brains have calcified (i.e. they lost the ability to learn or accept new things).
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5 year olds can use Linux/GNOME/OpenOffice. So what's the problem with adults?
5 year olds have nothing to lose by getting it wrong.
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80% of the users were satisfied with the new desktop, and a further 10% just complained about transient problems.
I want to see 80% of the users happy with Windows....
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I personally blame Linux for getting my 14 year old daughter pregnant, giving mange to my dog, the dandelion problems in my lawn, Obama's failing numbers, the death of Art Carney, the immigration problem, Starbucks coffee prices, the bikini barrista near my house being shut down by the city, the "Gulf War", and Lindsey Lohan failing a drug test.
I couldn't care less if "the press" is jumping on the "me too" wagon.
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If Microsoft was allowed to make as much money as it should under a properly operating closed source software ecosystem, people from Seattle wouldn't need to sell overpriced coffee to get rich!
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows fanboy here?
NTFS still is offering features
Like online defragmentation? Like a complete check of 64GB and more in under 3 seconds? Like the ability to delete files that are in use or otherwise blocked (like a stupid application or a virus)?
but important things like GPU scheduling so that the OS controls the GPU and application usage and allows for non-graphical GPU processing without worry that games or the application UIs will suffer, stall, and fail to render.
I run games and 3D effects on my laptop all the time and there are no issues what-so-ever with UIs or whatever.
Linux had a huge chnace here and instead demonstrated what many of us find all too often, for an old kernel model, and an old OS model, and an old graphical protocol, it is not a mature OS for the mainstream. Good concepts, but dated, and too many bandaids to try to bring these to modern computing effectively.
Right, that is why Linux is now number one in servers and embedded devices, also number one in super computers and widely used for 3D effects in moves. That's also why the NYSE switched to Linux [nytimes.com]. Look around, Linux is now used everywhere except for the desktop and there is mostly because there are missing applications (and missing pre-installations).
Facts are, Linux is not only a viable alternative to Windows, it's more secure (no viruses), it's use less resources (you can run it in a 256MB RAM machine, with under 1GB of HDD space), it's more suited for terminals and virtualization, there are multiple vendors which to choose for support.
The really only thing what users are complaining is the lack of applications, like Photoshop, MS Office, etc. Just look at the other countries and communities that are using Linux very successful and are not only more secure but paying less. Nobody would use Windows for anything, if Photoshop, MS Office and Outlook/Exchange would run on Linux. Windows is just a play system to run your games on, real work is done mostly with Linux.
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Insightful)
How the hell is Powerpoint the killer app?
I mean, seriously? I can see people being quite attached to their VBA Macros in Excel, their Access database with forms, or even just pissed off because Word and Writer don't have exactly equivalent formatting and their documents look like ass when opened by Office. But Powerpoint? It puts stuff up on a screen. So does Impress.
Re:translation hard to understand... (Score:4, Funny)
Powerpoint kills meetings dead.
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Wrong. PowerPoint presentations are the only entertainment during the dead meetings.
Nokia then.. (Score:2)
Perhaps they should have gone with Nokia E7 [engadget.com] instead.
It's said to be the best business device Nokia, or anyone else, has ever produced and comes with the touted ability to create PowerPoint slides on the go
Android will get there soon enough, and then we'll see these devices replacing Windows desktops, first sales and management then marketing then operations, then everyone else.
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It's not too difficult to understand if you think about what's going on in the use case: presentation software is used in situations where the presenter is having their competence judged.
Imagine this prosecutor shows up with an .odp file that can't be used by the industry standard, PowerPoint-based set up provided by the venue. So after bit of confusion, he gets it saved as a .ppt file. It looks like ass. He started late. Some of the transitions or animations go funny in the change of file format. He's put
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Umm.. yea (Score:3, Interesting)
Reading through the issues, it seems they didn't actually stage and test this before deploying it. Typically, in real IT shops, that's what you do. Development, Staging, Beta, rinse, repeat, certify it, freeze it, and then production.
It sounds like that just slapped that shit app in there and didn't look at the how it was slamming the database. You can't change the database. You have to change the application. Which is quit a big deal without programmer's.
Methinks none of those monkey's have ever done this before.
Re:Umm.. yea (Score:4, Informative)
The windows data base they were speaking about was a product named "Konsul" (a proprietary data base developed by a swiss company). No, I didn't hear about that data base before either (I had to google it to find out it was a swiss product, although I suspected it due to the name), and of course it got lost in the Google translation.
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I think I see what the problem was (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I think I see what the problem was (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I think I see what the problem was (Score:5, Funny)
What do you expect? The baker had no more croissants.
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Personalized searches I've heard of. But personalized translations are new to me. I get: "Delays in the implementation, immature software, eaten employees"
Actually the German text contains "angefressene Mitarbeiter"; while "angefressen" literally indeed means "partially eaten", this is an idiomatic usage in which it means "angry".
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I thought it meant 'unpaid' or 'paid less than required'. At least, that's its meaning in Danish ('afspiste').
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That's the funniest translation error I've seen in a while :D
Angefressen actually means annoyed/pissed off - literally translated... yeah, partially eaten. :p
Re:I think I see what the problem was (Score:4, Funny)
Must have been some kind of byte-overflow error.
subject (Score:2)
Employees Eaten by Linux Torvalds (Score:5, Funny)
From the article:
Delays in the implementation, immature software, eaten employees...
It's no wonder Linux never got off the ground, if employees have to fear being eaten, then there's something seriously bad about the implementation.
Although I'm hoping this is just a Google Translation error, but seeing how many billions of dollars Google has to refine its programs, I'm doubtful that this is anything but a perfect translation.
My condolences to the employees who were eaten by Linux.
Re:Employees Eaten by Linux Torvalds (Score:5, Informative)
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'Fed up' is the closest in English which means 'pissed' but can be confused with 'eaten'.
Interesting translation error.
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maybe they use 64 bite linux
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In the absence a better translation (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's not automatically assume that's because Linux really isn't ready for desktop use - or that there's corruption going on.
A major transition like this is hard. Linux doesn't have anything like Active Directory for the desktop (Anyone who suggests you use something like Puppet is living in another world. AD comes with policies ready to go, all you need to do is tick the necessary boxes and you can be reasonably sure that when you tick the box, it'll actually do what it says. Writing and debugging equivalent configuration for even a tenth of that in Puppet would cost a lot more in man-hours than all the Windows licenses you can shake a stick at). There's no realistic replacement for the combination of Outlook/Exchange. (BTW, I can't remember the username but every time I post something like this one of the authors of Citadel comes out of the woodwork and suggests I check that. Terribly sorry, but I have. No offence, but I don't believe you've used a properly administered Exchange installation if you honestly think Citadel's a viable replacement.)
I haven't even considered the possibility of custom-written software which was intended for Windows and will require re-writing. Wine doesn't cut it when your suppliers' response to any query is going to be "You're running under what?!"
Add to that the fact that a lot of people don't really know how to use their computer - they just know to click on the "button on the left" or "third one from the right". Even very subtle change will cause such people no end of trouble, and even if you're in a part of the world with at-will employment you can't sack them because otherwise you'd be sacking 20% of your workforce. I'm not even remotely surprised to learn that someone's tried a migration and messed it up.
The thing that does surprise me is that the same desktop users who will call the helpdesk every 15 minutes with a Linux desktop will almost certainly not object anywhere near so vocally when they're put onto Windows 7 and an upgraded Office suite. Part of me wonders if you'd see different results if you took Ubuntu, changed the boot and login screen to say "Microsoft Windows 8", re-branded OpenOffice as "Microsoft Office 2009" but left everything else as a normal Ubuntu install.
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Honestly, I don't really believe in large scale migrations of existing Windows infrastructure to Linux. Large migrations are hard to do at the best of times, always cause a lot of resistance and frustration, and take a long time before they start paying off, if that even happens at all.
Migrations from some Unix to Linux are a bit easier because you usually get similar and often better software than what you had.
Migrating from the Microsoft stack of Windows, Exchange Server, Active Directory, Office, and, ce
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"This is where you hit your biggest resistance: they will have to re-learn things, which will take time, effort and money. People will get upset, they will hate the new system, and they will complain about it, loudly, and to anyone who will listen."
They do the same thing at every upgrade, what is your point ? Bad PR for GNU/Linux ?
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Honestly, I don't really believe in large scale migrations of existing Windows infrastructure to Linux. Large migrations are hard to do at the best of times, always cause a lot of resistance and frustration, and take a long time before they start paying off, if that even happens at all.
I agree 100% with you, large scale migration from Window to Linux are almost impossible. I'm a Linux users since a long time and I'm really happy with it but I'm working in a big international firm and a migration to Linux would be simply impossible. The main reason is that we depends on hundreds of different applications that only works on Windows and was developed with Windows in mind. Some of this application are also of critical importance so you cannot think to replace them without incurring in a huge
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Now, for a different scenario, consider an organization that is just getting started. There are only a few people there, and the whole IT infrastructure still has to be set up. This, I think, is a scenario where free software can be very successful. It's also an interesting scenario to think about. Suppose you wanted to set up the IT infrastructure for at least a few hundred users, most of whom would have jobs where they have to use computers, without necessarily having any affinity for computers themselves. Assume you would need some common infrastructure: e-mail for everyone, calendaring would be very useful, and at least some desks will have computers that any among a group of people will have to be able to log into and get to work with (i.e. they won't have their own desk and their own computer). How would you do it?
With a Mac.
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Did yo
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Please be honest and serious - there were better implementations of mail transfer agents and email clients before either of those two existed (both are still flaky at times). The only extra thing they bring is a built in calendar instead of using a separate application.
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Right.... but the fact is that the people who demand Outlook and Exchange aren't using it as a plain MTA and MUA. They're using the calendar, they're using the shared features of the calendar, they're using the ability to delegate checking email to someone else (how else did you think the CEO's PA checks his email without knowing his password? Magic?), they're using the global address list (something which Thunderbird still doesn't do properly, even with an LDAP server appropriately configured), they're us
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Beyond the straw poll thing, all this can be done with Zimbra without any problem. We did an Exchange/Outlook to Zimbra/Zimbra Web Client migration and couldn't be happier. Sync to Blackberries and other smartphones works flawlessly, shared folders/calendars, account delegation, etc - all work perfectly. All for a lot less money and headache.
If someone wanted that straw poll thing you're talking about, it would probably be trivial to implement as a Zimlet.
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So, if it's such an important thing, some company should buck up and pay for the man hours to make it happen. Open source doesn't develop itself. Freedom isn't free.
Re:In the absence a better translation (Score:4, Insightful)
You seriously want a corporation to spend money developing something that their competitors will then get for free?
You don't understand how the corporate world works, methinks... such a proposition has absolutely no ROI at all, because it's unsellable. Corporate greed will win out over free software in this case. If it's that important, and you want somebody to buck up and put in the work to get it done, why aren't you volunteering your own time?
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You seriously want a corporation to spend money developing something that their competitors will then get for free?
Yes, pretty much. They're using for free something that someone else spent money on, developing it to the point that it's at now. Improving it for the good of the community of users by putting some resources into further development of the project, and giving it back to the community is exactly how open source is supposed to work.
You don't understand how the corporate world works, methinks... such a proposition has absolutely no ROI at all, because it's unsellable.
I understand that a lot of corporations are locked into a greed mentality and are not capable of seeing the value of open source. They're happy to make use of things if they're
I think some Linux users for get that (Score:2)
Or perhaps never know. I find that many of the "All Linux all the time," proponents have no real enterprise experience with it. They use it at home, of course, and they may have set it up for a small scale office. From this, they figure that means it is ready for the enterprise. It does everything they want, and they can't see any reason it wouldn't work...
Well one of the things Microsoft is extremely good at is enterprise support tools. As you noted, Active Directory has no peer in the open source world. A
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Indeed. Imagine the slightly changed scenario: The organization-wide video broadcast is needed not tomorrow, but today, in five hours. Do you really want to reboot your whole network during work time (and lose valuable work time, not to mention the angry reactions of employees you'll have to e
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Poor planning. Unless this is the very first video of this kind, users will already have the required settings and applications on the workstation. If it is the very first, some prior planning, testing, and deployment would have been in order.
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Just to add on to what joelleo is talking about:
-Group Policy applies to OUs, Sites, Domains, and (after 2003/GPMC) allows you to do security group filtering.
-User John is in the Call Center departm
So it looks as if 2010... (Score:2)
It looks as if 2010 really is the year of the Linux Desktop! At least, compared to 2011.
Local maxima etc.
Quick Summary (Score:5, Informative)
For those who prefer a quick human translation over a state-of-the-art Google Translate result, here is what I gleaned from the article. German is not my first language; corrections and other improvements welcome.
Short summary:
- The project wasn't going well from the beginning
- The project definitely failed, but you can't entirely blame that on Linux
- Lack of organizational talent definitely played a role in the failure
- In a survey, about 80% of employees stated they were satisfied with the new environment, 10% complained about issues they thought would be resolved over time, and only 10% were really dissatisfied
- The media played a large role in the perception of the project by eagerly latching on to every bit of bad news about the project
Partial translation, paragraph by paragraph:
Nine years after the decision to migrate the computers of the Solothurn kanton to Linux, a radical reversal has come today: all desktops will be converted to Windows 7. Did Linux fail?
The project wasn't a great success from the beginning; those who followed the media must have gotten the impression that it was a sequence of failures and bad luck.
Problems during the migration, software than wasn't ready yet, angry employees who set up a homepage to vent their frustrations and who couldn't get any work done because of Linux - all of this suggests that tax money was being spent on a project doomed to fail. And it has failed now. But to blame it all on Linux would be short-sighted. When you look further, you will see that many factors were responsible for the failure.
The decision to convert to Linux came in 2001. The goal was to have completed the conversion by 2007. However, that goal was unattainable, because some invitations to bid were only sent out in 2006. The choice for the Scalix web interface wasn't a good one: even in June, the webmail interface lacked a task list and some of the comforts of native e-mail clients.
Many special applications could not easily be replaced by Linux solutions. This was compounded by problems with the Konsul database employed by the kanton of Solothurn for editing council decisions: the data file of this Windows software was not so easy to migrate. Project Ambassador was meant to allow interoperability with OpenOffice.org et al, but was postponed until end 2010 because of performance problems. As a result, none of the council members worked with Linux systems.
An internal inquiry among employees showed that about 80% of them were satisfied with the new environment. Ten percent complained about "childhood diseases" of the software, and only 10% were really unsatisfied. But that is still 100 employees, and they were a very vocal minority.
The Swiss media seized every opportunity to bring news of even the most insignificant frustrations in the kanton: a temporary printer problem that was solved quickly became "lasting printing problems". Quotes from employees who claimed to work more productively at home than at the office were gladly printed.
If there wasn't any bad news, the media simply manufactured some. When the state attorney's office held a conference for attorneys in 2009, they neglected to prepare a Windows system for displaying the PowerPoint presentations. The kanton police, who, according to the Berner Zeitung had "successfully defended itself against Linux" helped out and saved the attorney's office from embarrassment. Of course, there are many things you can blame on Linux, but lack of organizational talent of the conference organizer isn't one of those.
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German is not my first language; corrections and other improvements welcome
The link is to "heise Open Source" and and to what is unmistakably the argument for the defense: that any failings in Linux and Open Sourcce had nothing to do with this debacle.
If you try to search Google for an oppossing - or at least independepent - point of view you loop back to "Open Source" and Slashdot as the only sources for this story.
Both good and bad (Score:2)
Basically due to incompetence and/or sabotage (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's face it: If you do not have a clue hot to do an IT strategy and how to implement it, then Windows can at least give you a semblance of success. Not that anything will run well or cost-effective, but it will run. (For now at least.)
With Linux , you actually have to know what you are doing. It is not really that hard, but some understanding is non-optional. Solothurn made a number of really bad and really obvious mistakes. I am undecided whether this was due to intentional sabotage of the effort or due to incompetence. I suspect a combination of both.
Disappointed and saddened (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sad to say that I, as a die-hard AIX/Linux/Mac fanboi have had to recommend migrating healthcare applications to Windows servers, and testing with Windows clients. This is because the healthcare organisations who will look after the applications in three years time at the end of the project, will not have the skills, enthusiasm or experience to run anything that isn't Windows.
I accept that for most people, the desktop is and will be Windows. For some, who don't need encouragement Windows will always be anathema, and all flavors of unix, be they GNU/Linux, AIX or Mac (other versions are available) will be preferable and worth any effort required to use instead. I bet I could have fixed any and all problems that these guys came up with, but when you are faced with users who are baying for a particular solution, rather than establishing what their requirements are, it is a lost cause.
Notoriety wish (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm always surprised of how this things are implemented. They usually _start_ with a bang and public announcements and trumpets and all. That is, before they have done anything. When you see something like that, you know they are going to have lots of problems, simply because the people that thinks that way (first let's make a big decision and a big press conference) usually cannot think in the way needed to solve the very difficult problems that arise in big migration.
IT systems have become very complex things that pervade our work and private life. They have evolved for decades to adapt themselves to peoples' needs, and people has changed too to adapt to the IT systems. Windows has been part of that mutual evolution for many years now, and Linux hasn't. That's the elephant in the room that nobody speaks about. Linux won't be able to compete with Windows till it has many many years, not of existing, but of being widely used (even in special locations like call centers and so), after it.
For doing migrations I'd recommend the following guidelines:
- Gradually is the thing. Start with localized users, preferably new people that haven't got used to the old system.
- These new users have to get a good experience. If you cannot make it happen for a couple of desktops, sure you won't be able to make everybody switch.
- Provide comparative advantages to the new users. Things like putting big screens in the Linux systems will make other people wish they had been migrated.
- Everything you use should work in both systems. If something cannot (Outlook/Exchange, custom apps, Access databases) then you have to search for an alternative or replacement. If no alternative exists that is good enough, you better forget about the whole idea.
- Even if everything works in both systems, when you set up something new (database or anything) make sure it works a bit better in the Linux than the Windows systems.
- Set no end date for the migration. You are going to keep Windows for a long time, so don't fight it. Gradually is the thing, remember.
Here's my take on it... (Score:3, Interesting)
These guys basically steamrolled the users onto Linux without doing an adequate evaluation of their environment and without following through with a solid beta program. I'm sensing this *could* have been successful if they'd been more organized about it.
I speak from experience as a guy whose been responsible for a somewhat medium sized (several departments in a large corporation) migration from windows to Linux.
The first thing you do is you go talk to your users and figure out what they're doing for a job and see if Linux actually will work in their environment! If they spend all day writing VB applications that interact with a SQLserver database... Linux probably won't be a good fit.
The next thing you do is go and recruit some beta users who are willing to be guinea pigs. Then setup a system that'll work for them. Be prepared to sit in plenty of offices and debug issues. After the kinks have been worked out and they've been happily working for a week or two... convert a few more users... rinse, latter, repeat. It might be that you'll get all the kinks worked out and you can do 20 people at a time.
A few things you need to consider even before doing this...
* Authentication... is each machine going to be an island? Most corporations really frown on this... are you going to tie them into Active Directory? Setup a NIS bridge? Things to think about..
* Home Directories... Where's their home dir going to reside? In my case, peoples home directories hang off a unix machine running NIS / Samba, so that wasn't such an issue...
* Printers, etc.
Also remember that your users will never give you the full truth... invariably you'll get a call because [insert obscure scan/printer/web cam] doesn't work.
Another thing you need to be able to do is concede defeat in some cases. In each department I've got probably ~20 people who didn't want to switch. Either they didn't want to switch or there was some compelling reason that they couldn't switch, be okay with it and move on.
So this migration had nothing do with Linux not being suitable for the desktop, this was a IT failure.
Not so easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Using ldap for web services was easy enough as was getting win 7 desktops joined up. The hard part was getting Ubuntu machines on the domain...
The first thing I tried was likewise-open which I had a number of problems with. We eventually settled on winbind which worked incredibly well for a samba file server joined to the domain, but for desktops it wasn't ideal. If the domain controller became inaccessible for whatever reason, the whole machine would freeze up even with cached credentials turned on. The other caveat was user's inability to change their domain passwords from Linux. Well.. it was possible but whenever they changed their password, both the new and old passwords would still work. (see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_&_Active_Directory#password_changes [samba.org]) It was also impossible to force a user to change their password, it would fail constantly.
If I weren't so determined I would have likely just gone with Windows 7 for ease of use despite the extra cost. There is one more commercial product I need to try and that's centrify. Fingers crossed.
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Reading comprehension fail (Score:2)
If you're going to spend money why don't you just buy a damn SBS and use AD?
The GP did use AD. Re-read this quote from the GP, my friend:
This meant it had to be AD.
If that doesn't convince you, read this quote, then read up up on the description for the likewise-open [ubuntu.com] package.
The first thing I tried was likewise-open which I had a number of problems with.
If the GP wasn't using AD, then what the heck were they doing using a tool that provides "authentication services for Active Directory domains"?
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Fwiw, my company uses centrifydc, and has been pretty happy with the results. Largish (~35k users) enterprise, aix, solaris, Linux, and lots of winxp & server. As someone who primarily works on the Linux/unix side of things, I was skeptical about the whole "AD integration!" aspect, but it's been a pretty solid tool. Only noticeable hassle is I no longer have a sudo to unlock a user's account if they fat finger their password. :). We did have to upgrade a couple of our samba servers to a centrify-comp
Ya it's a pain (Score:5, Informative)
We are a Windows/Solaris/Linux shop and central authentication and management is a big problem. Using an AD as the backend would probably have been easier, but our UNIX guy would not accept any situation where Windows was the core of the system. So we use LDAP. However OpenLDAP was not at all suitable for the purposes, Sun Directory Server, which is free but the servers it runs on are pricey. It is also no longer available from Oracle so we are going to have to consider what to do. That then required the use of IDsync, which wasn't free, as well as a good deal of custom programming. The current solutions works, and has an LDAP server and AD that are sync'd to each other, but are running separate and one can continue if the other fails.
It also means that management of the two kinds of systems is totally separate. Other than logins, which are of course global (the whole point of the system) and automounting storage, nothing else is shared management wise. Windows is managed through the AD, Linux through Puppet, at least when Puppet works (it is rather problematic). Solaris is more or less all central, no apps on individual systems, only central apps because of management problems. Windows is per system, of course. We have different support people who deal with different domains of the system.
At any rate it works, but it was not easy to make work. Also none of this deals with migration, this is side-by-side support. I wouldn't even want to think what it would take to try and support some of the things done on Windows on Linux instead. It would NOT just be "Oh use OpenOffice instead of MS Office," never mind that even that would be problematic (OO doesn't do everything MS Office does).
It's not easy (Score:4, Interesting)
I did some small and medium business migrations towards FOSS software and I can attest that it's not easy.
Key factors I've encountered are: users have a bad predisposition, they always prefer windows because they (think they) know it, they have it in their home computer, notebook and phone, and they don't want to make the effort to learn another system; there are custom developed apps that not always are easy or at least economically feasible to migrate; there are software that are probably easy to migrate but you lost support if your server is not windows, and you are setting yourself in a position where you will be blamed by any problem a computer could ever have, related or not to FOSS.
In my experience trying to perform a 100% migration is not very easy not desirable: except in very restricted environments, every non trivial system will always be made up of heterogeneous OSes and apps. Because of smartphones, laptops and embedded systems, that mixture is pretty much guaranteed these days. So it's better to move early the back systems: replace mail servers, file servers, databases, printservers, backup systems, http and ftp servers, LDAP, routers, firewalls... and make sure they work and are appropriately configured.
Then deploy OOorg to _windows_ WS, perhaps with Firefox and Thunderbird (I always though that the Thunderbird developers would be looking at Pegasus Mail, sadly they weren't). That way your users will be familiar with the apps and then changing the "desktop" will be more easy. Change the users WS OS progressively, change first the WS of the more "advanced" users and try your best to show the deployment of the "new" system as a privilege; if you can, change the OS and put a new WS for it, or at least a new or bigger monitor.
Important factors in success and collaborative users is to provide them with compatibility: you're migrating, the rest of the world no. So you have to make sure your users can communicate with the external world: not only OOorg has to open xls and doc files; they _need_ to chat in the msn network, watch videos on youtube, and so on. Those are as much as important as to be able to do the work if you want your users supporting you.
Be careful choosing a X environment: the popularity of Ubuntu these days hides the fact that it can be obnoxious and overcomplicated for end users. A smaller, lighter and more orthogonal desktop environment (like XFCE) could be better.
Don't try for the new environment to mimic "look and feel" of windows: it's far more irritating to encounter subtle and minimal differences in behavior that to face a complete different approach. Most users spend 90% of they time in two or three apps (mail, office suite, some custom or enterprise app) and they simply don't care about anything else.
Your ultimate goal is to be asked to install "linux" on their home boxes or laptops. That will happen when they feel comfortable and familiar with the new system.
The problem with the Swiss ... (Score:4, Interesting)
"The second saddest thing about the Swiss is that they think they combine the creativity of Italians with the organization of the Germans; the saddest is that in reality it's the other way round."
-- Oscar Wilde
Re:FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it clearly shows that OSS cannot compensate stupidity from the planners, and that it is very easy to put the blame on Linux instead.
Re:FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
But unfortunately, that is precisely the rhetoric that the OSS community is accused of brandishing all the time. The bottom-line is people do not care about the principles of freedom of code and other Stallmanisms when they are at work (which may come as a surprise on Slashdot). There are certain applications for Windows that just don't have a replacement on Linux yet, period. I'm sorry you can't argue with that fact.
I know the beauty of Linux/OSS is that anyone can write a replacement app - but I am a molecular biologist with a research grant. I find it easier to purchase the Windows license (which is usually in built in the cost of the computer anyway) and the 5000 Euro worth of licenses I need, than to hire a Linux coder or write the programs myself - it costs more in hours that way. And I'd rather be doing molecular biology , which is my job and expertise, than to be figuring out the innards of the Linux kernel (OSS means I can). To be honest, Windows 7 is rather well-done in my opinion and that makes the move to Linux even less lucrative.
I believe this is the case in every situation where there is a organized system already in place and the computing has to merge with the existing framework - such as the bureaucracy at a city department, or a research pipeline.
Re:FOSS (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it easier to purchase the Windows license (which is usually in built in the cost of the computer anyway) and the 5000 Euro worth of licenses I need
I did my MS in chemical engineering focused on quantum chemistry / molecular simulation / molecular modeling / "nanotechnology". In my field the mainstays all run on clustered supercomputers running some form of Unix: Gaussian (which has a Windows version too), DL_POLY, VASP, MOPAC, Cerius2, ... Even the visualization tools often were Unix-only requiring an X11 server. Though some of the grad students wished for more Windows packages, it was pretty much a given that doing real work in quantum chemistry means learning to love Unix.
I'm curious: which Windows-only packages are hot in your field?
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1. Vector NTI (DNA manipulation)
2. All confocal microscope drivers and analysis software
3. Origin Pro (statistics and graphic with interfacing for Matlab and Labview
4. Bitplane Imaris (3D analysis on biological samples with a patented,proprietary and the only non-heuristic deconvolution algorithm)
That said , yes , our cluster runs Linux too. We just run whatever works best for a particular application (isn't that what it should be like, rather than insisting on one kind or the other?)
Re:FOSS (Score:4, Informative)
But if you had read the article, it didn't mention a single such application which was a problem. The main problems were:
* An extremely bad choice of the free email system (it explicitly said that other systems existed which would have provided the missing functionality).
* A proprietary data base (and unfortunately they didn't even choose one of the major ones). There are definitely good free databases; moreover there are also closed source databases running on Linux.
* Mistakes which were completely unrelated to the migration being blamed on the migration.
5 Lessons for the next time. (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, the Swiss screwed up. It happens. Get over it, learn the lessons there are to be learned, and move on.
Lesson 1: Don't announce you're going to move everyone, and it's going to happen by X date. Not everyone is going to switch, and X is a variable, not a const.
Lesson 2: Some things take longer to "work with" than scrapping. The town council database app is obviously one of those.
Lesson 3: Stop with the stupidity of using a web interface for almost everything. It doesn't work. It p*sses people off (or as the article says, get them half-eaten). Get devs who can also code with qt or wxwidgets or java or tcl/tk or whatever.
Lesson 4: Sell to your users. Make it a privilege to be part of the transition. You want people b*tching and moaning about not being "upgraded" to the new linux desktop, not the other way around. Marketing 101.
Lesson 5: Provide effective feedback channels, so that people don't feel they need to set up a web site just to complain because you aren't listening.
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You know, that is the first time I've read somewhere that people don't like using a webinterface.
The problem is usually they don't like webinterface x, just like they don't like desktop app y.
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Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, it clearly shows that CSS cannont compensate stupidity from the planners, and that it is very easy to put the blame on Windows instead.
No, it doesn't show that. Maybe a future story about their problems migrating back to Windows will, though :-)
Re:FOSS (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains.
It's almost a meme around here that "joe sixpack" simply doesn't pay attention to computers but here it seems there has been a strong campaign in press against the migration from the very begining as if it were a sensible issue for general public.
And then, this project has been cancelled when internal polls show that only around 10% of users -and it seems "end users" are implyied, not sysadmins, were dissatisfied and 80% were satisfied with the new environment (I'd bet that's and expectable turnaround for *any* environment change).
One should ask himself if there might be some kind of pressure from "other vendors with deep pockets".
It's obvious too that has been some managerial mistakes that, as such, could be an expected source of problems no matter what the migration path were as, per instance, towards Windows 7 instead of Linux. There has been problems that tough counted on the negative side of the migration seem indeed to be more on the side of the lackings from the preceding environment (like a closed database that ends up being difficult to transition -heck, that's why you are migrating: to avoid things like that to happen... from then on).
All in all it's an enlighting example... mainly about how carefully the "soft side" of a migration towards open source should be managed. As in "be prepared to withstand attacks from the older stablishment trying to regain its lost power -and licenses" or "people will take the problems with a Windows to Windows upgrade as a non issue -it might be because the name doesn't change, even if most of the environment so does, while in a Windows to Linux migration everything and the kitchen sink will be Linux' fault no matter what so you'd better choose very carefully your stakeholders and make sure they feel involved as a driving force".
By the way, any new news about Munich?
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By the way, any new news about Munich?
Last time I checked only 2000 out of their 14000 computers had been migrated to Linux.
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"Yeah, this story is pretty self-explaining... good work FOSS!"
Yes, this story is pretty self-explaining... but I question what does indeed explains
So did I, but for a different reason:
"Open Source - News For The Enterprise" is the only source for the story.
Everyone else I found searching Google just repeats the tale as told on Slashdot, as if it were the gospel truth -
and not merely an argument for the defense that exonerates Linux and the Open Source app of any and all responsibility for the debacle.
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A bit like states in the US. The real question, to my mind, is WHY DOES A CANTON HAVE A CIO?
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The real reason is that Anonymous Coward is not ready to use a Desktop.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The number of people who have to work with the system are clearly in the minority. Most people never have any contact with the system, and believe whatever the press tells them about it.
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Linux requires ongoing support and management, just like windows.
If cost of windows licenses plus cost of support staff for ongoing operations is less than cost of Linux (you can buy support from companies like red hat, and guess what an enterprise is going to do?) plus the cost of support staff for ongoing operations, then tco of windows is LOWER than tco of Linux.
Frankly, with enterprise licensing agreements, I'd be surprised if the licenses were anything approaching even a sizable minority, much less a m
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it does, and I didn't say that those two items are the only components of TCO.
I was illustrating a point, where somebody basically claimed that, because of "license fees," the "TCO of Windows" was infinite, and that Linux was clearly the lower TCO. Anybody with a shred of common sense knows that license fees are a vanishingly small portion of TCO, and it's easy to see that simply the cost of labor to deploy, maintain, and manage could offset the license costs.
As far as: "How about the costs incu