Chris said:
Rob,
Your talking to the Windows guy here. I was the guinea pig for the open source experiment we did. Good software to be sure, just not as overall integrated and continually upgradable business package as Office. With Office being from one source you know whom to complain to about problems.
We do run Linux for server and internet access. Costs & security being a major factor. We spend plenty for desktops and notebooks with windows, and with some work arounds can backup data to our Linux servers.
Thanks to Diane, we can now sync our destops with our notebooks, then with our workarounds backup .pst files to our Linux servers.
Would love to use Exchange, but is mostly cost prohibitive to many small businesses. Wish Microsoft had "Exchange server lite".
Chris,
Yes, I could tell you were a "Windows guy".
Full disclosure. I just use computers to do things, and I've ended up
using both Windows and Linux. Can see both sides, and not fanatical
about either.
Just didn't want misleading information being perpetuated since all
these threads are searchable forever and someone may use this
information for some fruitful purpose.
Some other comments I'll make and then we'll leave it there. I'm not
saying that Linux and other products are what you need ... just getting
you to see it from another perspective. My hunch is you care about ROI
at your business.
1. Don't think Linux is just open source. Open Source is a licensing
model. Much open source is available for Windows too!
2. Overall integration with Windows is better than currently available
in any Linux-based system. The integration I think you mean is cutting
and pasting, data exchange formats, etc. This integration provided by
KDE or Gnome desktop. However, watch out. Imminently it's going to be
exceeding expectations. Take time for people to notice and agree, but
it's progressing very very fast.
3. The "feature" of Office to be continually upgradeable is benefit to
your business, apparently. Many businesses are starting to learn that
constant upgrades of Office without any noticeable reasons for change
are not necessarily in the business's interest. Depends on business
needs of course. Upgrading Office is complicated/complex/expensive.
Does this expenditure have a ROI?
4. If you feel good about having once source for Office (Microsoft),
that's fine. Complaining to Microsoft is good fun. When, though, have
you seen them actually fix something that you complained by releasing a
fix? Are you getting good ROI on the time/costs you spend complaining to
Microsoft? The Office equivalent for running on Linux would be Star
Office which is licensed by Sun and is supported fully by them. Or you
can use the OpenOffice version which is essentially the same but don't
call Sun. It's a terrific product. For many business where all they
need is word processing, spreadsheet, etc. ... it's terrific.
5. You mention you need "workarounds" to backup to the Linux boxes.
Can't think what "workarounds" should be needed. Doing it that way is
good and will work using bog standard approaches. "workarounds not
required". The Linux servers should be running Samba to provide a
resource share visible to the Windows boxes, e.g. "backup". These share
points would be user-specific. Use Windows backup program to direct the
backups from the Windows box to the "backup" share on Linux (running
Samba). These backups will backup the outlook PST files since they are
in the "profile".
6. I sync XP laptops to Linux boxes with no workarounds. We set shares
on Linux and then connect to them from Windows XP laptops. make them
available "offline" and then use synchronisation to keep them "synced".
No workarounds required. I don't know why you need to use
"workarounds". use the standard capabilities of XP and Linux.
7. In addition, for those parts of our laptops we don't want to
synchronise using standard XP synchronsisation (it takes time during
login and log out), we simply use a small bat file which makes a set of
calls to "robocopy" (available free from Microsoft) to synchronise a
whole bunch of folders. For example, our company web site sites on my
laptop under c:\data\web\. I produce it there. Then "robocopy" it to
the web server, then "robocopy" it back to the "pre-production" folder
on the laptop c:\website\. I use on the laptop using IIS and Apache
pointing to c:\website.
8. As Dianne pointed out, Microsoft makes Small Business Server
available at relatively low cost. I'm considering buying it to enable
setting up a Microsoft Project Server (with SQL Server, SharePoint,
etc.) in support of our business services. Total package cost is
getting up there pretty high and I'm still thinking about it. Exchange
comes with Small Business Server. I cna't really think why we would
need to replace what we have for email etc. to use Exchange to make the
change worth it, though. Our email is based on Sendmail/Fetchmail in
Linux, our collaboration is via discussion groups on Linux-based web
server. For calendars, we don't try to get in everyone's way with
scheduling meetings automatically (waste of time). People just are
required to keep their schedule posted on their "web" site for others to
view. I use Outlook and save as html to my "web" site. Good enough for
our culture. (Hence even though we'll have Exchange with the purchase
of SBS, we won't use it). Also ... we use Linux/Samba to create the NT
Domain for the network. That also works very well.
9. If as a small business you are thinking of Exchange to enable sharing
of calendars and other aspects of Outlook, check out "Public Outlook"
available at
http://www.outlookstore.com/. Some folks I know running
small businesses use this and they are thrilled with getting the
functionality with Outlook (which they want to use) without Exchange
(which they didn't want do to high initial cost and high running costs).
To close ... there is no application in Linux world (or Windows world)
which does all that the OP wants in one package ... nor would I want it.
Others don't want it either. That's one of the reason it doesn't
exist. Outlook already is "too big".
