In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.
This whole "Microsoft free" experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop....at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.
I put "Microsoft free" in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio's proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.
With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.
Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this "Microsoft free" laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.
I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.
I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won't work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.
All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!
I just downloaded the last release of Open Office (v2.4) on both my Windows and Linux PCs. This version has some minor tweaks and fixes from v2.3. I can't wait for the 3.0 version which is scheduled for this summer. This version has many new features related to Web 2.0 and also works with Vista (God forbid) and Office 2007. In the meantime, you can download this file to make Open Office compatible with Office 2007. Check out this document for the full set of features and future direction of this excellent office product.
Open Office 3.0 - Get more documents
For those of you who still think that OO is not ready for prime time, think again. I have been using it at a Microsoft shop for a year and nobody can tell the difference. There have been over 1 million downloads of OO in just over the last 100 days. Version 3.0 will take it to the next level.
As I mentioned in the past, I contribute to the Open Office project in the area of marketing. I found this great post today about switching to Office and I thought I'd pass it along.
read more | digg story
I have written about my wiki implementation in the past. We use Mediawiki, the same open source software that drives the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia. Initially loading content into your wiki can be an enormous task, but Open Office, another popular open source tool, makes this task much less cumbersome. The latest version of Open Office Writer 2.3 has the ability to export documents to Mediawiki markup code. We used this to upload hundreds of existing pages of content into our wiki.
If you don't use Mediawiki, have no fear. You can always download an Open Office add-on called Uniwakka to convert your documents to the wiki format of your choice. If you are interesting in launching a wiki in your organization I recommend you read Stewart Mader's 21 Days of Wiki Adoption.
As an every day user of open source products both at work and at home, I feel obligated to give back to those who donate their time and energy for the greater good of computing. I have chosen to join the OpenOffice community and assist in Marketing and Quality Assurance. I have been using OpenOffice for years. I have many computers with various operating systems (Kubuntu, Linux Mint, PCLinuxOS, Mepis, XP, and Vista) and OpenOffice runs flawlessly on all of them. I have written about my experience with Open Office at work in the popular post Open Source and Microsoft Free. Like many corporations, my company uses Windows XP and Microsoft Office. I use Kubuntu and OO and have had very few issues exchanging documents with others both inside and outside the organization. I know that the quality of this product is the direct result of the hard work and dedication of many volunteers throughout the world. Now it's my turn to give back.
I will be working with the volunteers of the Marketing team and sharing information here on my blog from time to time. As a QA volunteer, I will log issues that I find myself or that are sent to me from my readers. So if you have any issues you would like to log please contact me at mkavis@yahoo.com so I can get the details.
In the mean time, let me share some information with all of you. For those of you who are new to OO, I have included some screen shots of the different tools the OO has to offer.
For you bloggers out there who use OO, go here to get banners to add to your blog like I have. I have also encouraged my team to contribute to an open source project of their choice. Not only will that allow my company to give back to communities that we reap benefits from, but it also gives us experience working with a very collaborative project environment. I believe that companies can learn a lot about how to successfully deliver software by experiencing the collaboration that goes into a release of open source software.
For those of you who use open source software on a regular basis, I encourage you to contribute. There are many ways to participate:
- Donate
- Develop
- Test
- Document
- Marketing
- Support
- Translations
I am doing an experiment at home. I recently purchased two new laptops from Dell for my wife and daughter for their birthday. As I wrote in a previous article, these laptops came loaded with Vista. Vista has completely frustrated my family because of the poor performance, the bugs, and the interface. My wife refuses to use her new laptop so I gave it to my son. I took my daughter's old PC (Dell 4300s with 1.7 GHz, 256MB memory, 40GB disk) that was performing poorly on XP and installed Kubuntu 7.04 on it. The install was incredibly simple despite the myth that Linux is hard to install. The total install took about 70 minutes. Most of that was due to the time it took to partition a very old hard drive. Once the install completed I plugged the PC into my Linksys access point and just like that I was up and running. I was able to see my shared folders on my XP machine and print to my Lexmark x73 scanner/printer.
As I have written in the past, I use Ubuntu at work. A friend of mine recommended Kubuntu so I tested it out at home. Kubuntu has a very nice user friendly interface. It's desktop manager is actually similar to Vista's. Kubuntu comes preloaded with Open Office, chat, dvd burning software, graphics software, the Konquerer browser, and many more open source software packages. This is the first time I used Konquerer and I found it to be equal to if not better then Firefox.
Like Ubuntu's package manager, Kubuntu has the Adept Manager which provides a simple user interface for installing software. For those users who are not hardcore Linux geeks and don't want to mess around with tar files and the like, Adept Manager is the tool for you. There are literally thousands of open source products listed by category and completely searchable. I added Wine, Thunderbird, Firefox, Gimp, and a hand full of other popular tools. I simply clicked the check box next to the desired software, clicked apply, and the Adept Manager did the rest. Who says Linux is hard to install?
So now that I have this up and running on my slowest and oldest machine, I am going to have my wife and kids test it out to see if it meets their needs. If they are comfortable using Kubuntu, which I expect they will be, I will be kicking Vista out of my house. I will always have my Dell XPS gaming machine with XP on it for the rare times where they can't get their needs met on Linux. So far the only thing I can come up with is some of the games we play. Most of the PC usage in my house is internet surfing, email, and office. We have been using Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird for years, so this should be a simple transition.
The next experiment will be my parents. I still have to reset the clock on their VCR everytime I go to their house. All they do is read email, surf a few web sites, and play Spades and Mahjong. I am giving them my son's old computer, which is a very good machine, and taking back their old PC. I will mess around with Mepis on that PC. Once I get that installed I will give it back to them with a wireless USB adapter and see how they adapt to Linux. They already struggle with XP so anything will be a challenge for them. If my parents are able to use Linux, then anyone can use it. I'll provide an update on their Linux experience in the next few weeks, assuming that I find time to get them set up.
A few months ago, I wrote an article called Open Source and Microsoft Free which discussed my switch from Microsoft XP to Ubuntu at work. In that article I discussed how after seven weeks, I was able to do my job with next to no issues. At the end of the article I recommended a small Linux pilot:The worst thing that can happen with a small pilot is that you discover that Linux won't work for your organization. At least then you can sleep at night knowing you did your homework and made a strategic decision based on real information.
I have now been Microsoft free at work for almost five months. We had our Linux pilot kickoff meeting yesterday and are preparing to pilot Linux, Open Office, Evolution email client (not replacing Exchange), and Firefox as the standard Open Source image. We have not yet selected which distribution of Linux we want to pilot (we have some more research to do here). For applications that require a Microsoft operating system we have two options. First, we will use Wine to install applications like Visio and IE for those drawings or activeX enabled web sites that don't have Open Source solutions at this time. The second option is to leverage one of our Citrix servers to host applications that will not work well without Microsoft products. We can simply consolidate all of these applications on a single Citrix server and install the Citrix client on each Linux user's desktop.
An important requirement of this pilot is to make sure we address all of the desktop standards that are enforced on our Windows desktops. That means we must address desktop lockdowns, patch management, data encryption and cryptography, virus scanning, and many other security and management features. Our current action item is to review all of these standards and present how we will address each one on our Linux desktops.
For this first pilot we agreed to keep it simple. We will select one Linux distribution, chose a small group of 5-6 users within IT, create a standard image for all pilot users, and create a self sufficient support plan so we don't interfere with the desktop team's day to day commitments. One thing I learned from all of the feedback I received from the last article and from talking to the management team of the desktop group is that doing this in stealth mode can be disruptive and a breach of security. Although the stealth mode initiative got us to this point, I regret not taking a more formal and open approach to a pilot. What I found is that my world is not so anti open source after all. In fact, having an Open Source strategy with an active Linux pilot gives you great leverage the next time you negotiate with Microsoft for Vista and Office 2007 licensing!
Our immediate goal is to collect information to understand the potential usability and support challenges of an enterprise Linux desktop solution. Do I think that we will ever replace Windows at work? Heck no. Do I think we have a substantial amount of users who can be fully functional without the costs of a Microsoft computing environment? Heck yes. The majority of PC and laptop users barely utilize the power of their hardware. They spend most of their time in email, a browser, and in Office. There is always the power users who have much more advanced requirements. But for the average computer user, the basic usage can easily be replaced with Open Source solutions.
I will continue to write periodic updates about our lessons learned over the next several months. I would welcome constructive feedback and would love to hear your experiences if you have been down this road before.
A few weeks ago I posted a few articles about Open Source (Still afraid of Open Source?, Eating my own dog food, and Open Source and loving it!). I have now been Microsoft-Free at work for about 7 weeks. I have also found solutions for almost all of the initial hurdles I encountered in the first week. Here is the list:
- Email - I now have Thunderbird working flawlessly as my email client in sync with Exchange. I do need to talk to the Exchange admin to change a setting on the Exchange Server so I can use the Calendar functionality with Sunbird. I am currently use Webmail for my calendar.
- Office - Open Office has worked well with Word, Power Point, Excel, and Adobe documents. I can use Wine to install Visio on my Ubuntu desktop. This doesn't allow me to be totally Microsoft-Free but there is no answer for Visio's proprietary format that I am aware of. This is not an issue with Open Source, the problem is that Microsoft doesn't use an open standard for their Visio product. Open Office Draw works fine for creating new drawings but can't import Visio documents saved in Visio format. I also downloaded OxygenOffice Professional that gives me the much needed templates and clip art that Open Office was missing.
- Browser - I have been using Firefox at work for years so this a no brainer.
- Printer - I do have one unresolved issue. I have an old HP Laserjet (about 8 years old). Although I can see the driver I can't get the printer to work. I have not invested a ton of time trying to fix it.
When I first started my experiment I was trying to keep it a secret out of fear of attacks from angry Microsoft worshipers (especially from the admins and desktop support). What I am finding out is that most of the folks that I was hiding from are sick and tired of supporting Windows and are proponents of Linux. Several of them are using Linux at home. One of the guys I talked to has Vista and XP installed on his laptop. He swaps out the hard drive when switching between OS's. He is less then impressed with Vista and complains about the slow boot time (2 times slower then XP). I recently moved to a new office and a desktop guy saw my Ubuntu desktop when I was moving. I expected an ear full but instead the guy said he fully supports a move to Ubuntu and wished the company would move in that direction. These stories are coming from Microsoft certified engineers who have spent years supporting Microsoft tools. These stories are not coming from anti-Microsoft people who worship Linux.
There is one myth I would like to discuss. I keep hearing how difficult it is to install Linux. I have two comments about this:
- I found the Ubuntu install to be quite simple. Maybe some of the older versions of Linux where cumbersome but the recent versions are very straightforward.
- If an organization chooses to go with Linux on the desktop, trained professionals will be responsible for installing Linux. This is how Windows gets installed today. People tend to accept that fact that Windows is a simple install because they receive their desktops or laptops already configured. Is the Windows install really all that much easier then the Linux install or is it the fact that most people never have to bother installing Windows?
I wrote a few articles about my recent switch to Ubuntu and my position on open source. Today I stumbled upon Alan Pope's article called "The Truth about Switching".
Alan's first bullet goes like this...
01. People will ridicule you for using Ubuntu
I have witnessed this first hand. A few people at work have busted my chops (in a nice way) for switching. Of course, they have never used Linux themselves. A fellow blogger took some shots at me and some how ended by comparing the open source movement to a communist revolution. I was almost ready to raise the terror alert to Red.
With all joking aside, I have found a few spare hours in my busy day to find additional open source products for my toolbox. Today I downloaded the Open Source Visio equivalent called Draw from OpenOffice.org. Draw worked great and was able to import files from many different formats. A cool blog that I subscribe to had a funny article about Visio and listed a few other alternatives.
I am currently working on a big BPM/SOA implementation. The team has a ton of requirements in a Word document that has use cases mapped to each requirement. This will quickly become a pain in the butt to manage and screams for a requirements management tool that will feed into our Mercury testing tools. Unfortunately, I have no budget for a requirements tool. Can you say Open Source to the rescue? I have started researching requirements tools and expect to have a solution in place and running by next week. The total cost will be...you guessed it...Zero dollars.
One place that I believe that Open Source really shines is in IT tools. In my lifetime, it has been very difficult to get funding for software development tools. The business invests so much money in infrastructure, CRM, financial systems, HR systems, and other enterprise initiatives that it is usually challenging to justify spending $100K-$300K on SDLC tools like portfolio management suites & CMDBs. Development tools like Reflection (a terminal emulator), Toad (a SQL tool), and many others are expensive. Multiply the cost of the license by your number of developers and the costs can get astronomical. Tools like these are no-brainers for open source alternatives. They are low risk replacements and save thousands of dollars.
That's my rant for today. I'll be back to share my experience of our new Open Source requirements tool. I have already found a few tools that have a decent sized community. They output xml which we can feed into our Mercury suite. This will eliminate the need for me to pay for licenses for our outsourcing partners. Stay tuned.
After writing an article that discussed embracing open source, one of my colleagues entered my office and gave me the "Eat your own Dog Food" speech. So he downloaded Ubuntu Desktop
for me using BitTorrent and burned me a CD. The install was simple and I was up an running in minutes. I have been running without one piece of Microsoft software on my laptop for three weeks now and I am loving it. Free at last, Free at last!
There are some challenges though. Open Office is a great replacement for Microsoft Office but I can't find a replacement to read existing Visio diagrams. Today I received an MS Project file that I couldn't open. I am sure if I search the net I can find an open source tool to do the job. I also had a problem with my printer driver which took some time to resolve. Thunderbird is a great email client but it doesn't have hooks into my Outlook Calendar so I can't use it for my corporate mail. I am using Evolution which is only marginal. When time allows I will test out Sunbird and Lightning.
But with all of that aside, I no longer wait for 5-10 minutes for my laptop to boot up. I don't wait forever for Outlook to come up in the mornings, and I don't get any system crashes. The blue screen of death is a distant memory and the daily reboot routine is no longer required. There are no stupid paper clips popping up asking me if I am sure that I know what I am doing.
I am sure my freedom will end when somebody in desktop services realizes that all of their Big Brother software is not being run on my laptop. I will enjoy the ride while it lasts.
I know the majority of the corporate world isn't quite ready to replace their Windows desktops with Linux yet, but I can tell you from my experience that Ubuntu is ready for prime time.
