🚀 go-pugleaf

Oliver Bannatyne wrote:
> I am investigating technology solutions on behalf of a small-medium sized
> inner-city finance firm. The firm is looking at a number of possible
> technology options. At the moment the firm has about 20x Pentium II PC's
> running Windows 95, 98, and 2000 and MS Office 95 and 97.  The firm is
> looking at moving to either stand-alone workstations or thin clients running
> linux, and MS Office (by use of Codeweavers CrossOver product -See
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/office/ and
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxofficeserver/.). The workstations will
> be upgraded, but only if they need to be.
> 
> I am trying to ascertain what is possible, and whether a (thick/thin client)
> linux (running CrossOver Office and MS Office) is robust enough in an
> commercial environment for use by this financial firm. I am unsure of the
> hardware requirements and the coverage of technical support available for
> such a setup. (Note: the firm does not have dedicated IT staff.) To further
> this goal, I am looking for any organisations that have implemented any
> similar system in New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Oliver Bannatyne
> Technology Consultant.
> 
> Phone Mobile: +64 21 2613151
> Temporary Phone DDI: +64 9 375 8513
> Temporary Email: KerrynB@SHlock.co.nz


I would ask why keep MS office, download and trial openoffice, I am at 
work and its good.  See if its good enough for you.

You have P11s so are they good enough ? or they lacking grunt? I would 
not run a 20 pc office without a server to centralise and back up your 
data. MS SBE is a reasonable product for that size of business, take a 
look at it, it depends on you want.  Linux could be an acceptable 
solution for thin clients but your talking 2 small servers clustered to 
ensure availability, thats not a real option for your size.

I would tend to suggest keeping the present MS clients, move to 
openoffice with samba as a file server. My reasoning for this is its 
simple, The key to supporting your business is KISS, keep it simple and 
stupid. Once you have proven openoffice is adequate consider moving to a 
linux desktop to improve reliability.

If you had 100 users or 200 I would tend to look to a thin client 
solution using 2 decent servers in a HA cluster situation, but at 20 
users the savings are just not there to justify the complexity.

regards

Thing