On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Neil Stevenson wrote:
> The trick is to show the un-enlightened that they'll still be able to sit in
> their comfort zone. Lets face it, if any of them ditched their windows
> system, they'd never use Outlook express to read their mail, they'd use
> Kmail or Netscape or summat like that.
While we're in the mood, a lot of my old colleagues down in Loughborough
have started rabbiting on about Evolution recently. I've never tried it -
it wanted me to install waaay too many extra RPMs which would have totally
fried what little Gnome stuff I do have installed... and I chant the
mantra "if it ain't broke..." on a regular basis.
> Most folks would go "Gnome, that looks a bit like what they used in that
> film 'antitrust'".
Erm... I doubt that. 'Antitrust' wasn't exactly a hit with Joe Q. Punter.
Sadly.
> Then perhaps this should be demonstrated too - the business users may find
> this to be just what they need; an Exchange/IIS server with a load of
> workstations running StarOffice and Pine on the employees desktops - costs
> them less and is more secure (except the IIS but of course, but I'm assuming
> they've already spent the cash on this).
Whoa there! Exchange & IIS? On the same machine? <adopts Fast Show voice>
With their reputation? Are you completely mad? </voice>
Let's not forget here, the Apache/Win32 port is pretty mature, too. So
that's something which we could tempt people away from the MS shrine with
:)
> Its quite hard to do that 'cos the users are bound to say 'can you show me
> something to do this...' only to discover you havn't got it. I'm sure if
> there is a broad range of things are on display, there will be something
> that can be adapted to show them exactly what they want.
Let's face it, the average user wants:
Word Processor
Spreadsheet
Presentation guff
Database
Email
Web
and that's about it. I bet if we did a random sample of people, that's
pretty much all they'd want for an office machine. And let's not forget,
the remote admin side is pretty cool too from a network management POV -
setup a 'master' server with Samba on it for all the Windows die-hards,
and use that to distribute software (whether RPM or tarballs, whatever)
using SSH to all the remote workstations.
Then when people turn up in the morning you can email them all using their
shiny X-based IMAP email client and tell them that their Office suite has
just been updated. Zero workstation downtime :) and nothing like as clumsy
as (say) the Novell ZENWorks gadget, or whatever it's called today.
Hell, you could even make the workstations 'dumb' and have them run all
their X apps on a remote application server. Windows Terminal Servcies,
anyone?
I better go and do some work, I think!
G
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