Desktop platforms Toolkit

Story: Government: Open source could halve school IT bills

• 
• 

So little time and so much to do.

I often hear that in Microsoft mostly environments.
Not to say that Microsoft mostly environments are complete rubbish. Fact is that many organization still depand on it today to facilitate many of their operations. But it is striking to see, time and time again, that non-Microsoft solutions require a whole lot less maintenance, troubleshooting and are far easier to upgrade or expand. Whatever it is it just keeps on working. Even to a degree that it's taken for granted (which can be a problem in itself, mind you). Most strikingly noticed in environments that are half Microsoft based and half non-Microsoft based. More then 80% of the man hours (and budget) goes into maintaining the Microsoft environment. Worse if something needs to be upgraded or expanded. That's asking a lot in my opinion and should at the very least justify an investment in investigating alternative total solutions (many organizations make the mistake of testing out only a piece of the pie and then failing along the way rather then first determining what they have (A), then figure out where they want to end (B), to then figure out how to get from A to B) in a small scale test environment (might even be a single department, say, the IT department) that represents the operational environment as closely as possible. Although that might turn out not to lead to a land of milk and honey at least then you can say: we tested it, completely and totally, and it didn't work for us. However, if that does turn out to be a desired end goal then there's still plenty of work that needs to be done to get there but once that's over with there will be enough budget and man hours savings to allow to concentrate on business needs and demands like never before (next problem then is to keep it that way).

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Full Talkback thread