Conversion to Linux

[Jeffrey Watts]

With that large of a setup I honestly think you ought to not look at Ubuntu
and instead look at Red Hat or SuSE.  Ubuntu has good community support and
offers some commercial support, but they are on another planet compared to
Red Hat and SuSE.  For the x86 world, Red Hat is probably the best
supported, and Red Hat has the largest network of support engineers and
cooperating vendors.

For example, Red Hat is soon about to fully support Exchange 2007.  Fedora
10 is featuring Samba 4 and _native_ Exchange 2007 MAPI support.  _Native_,
no OWA hacks or other such, so Evolution will work out of the box.  If
you're in an Exchange 2007 environment this will make a migration much
easier for you, as you can deploy the workstations while keeping your
mailserver, doing that final migration last.

Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based on Fedora, you can expect the Ex2007
support coming very soon, or you can probably port over the Fedora 10
packages yourself.

Red Hat also has by far the best training programs of any Linux vendor, and
the RHCE is the gold standard in Linux certs.  It's a much easier sell for
business types than Ubuntu and possibly SuSE (my understanding is that in
the mainframe world SuSE is the more popular).

If you go with a Red Hat scenario, I'd recommend using Fedora for your
workstations and Red Hat Enterprise Server for your key servers.  That would
be the most economical.  I'm a Red Hat Certified Engineer, so I can help you
with detailed questions if you need them.

Good luck.
Jeffrey.

P.S.  This isn't meant to disparage either Ubuntu or SuSE.  Both offer good
support and are good distributions, but my experience has been that Red
Hat's support, training, and professional services are far superior for
businesses.  Businesses care more about those things than they do about the
minor differences between distributions.

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Haworth, Michael A. <
Michael_Haworth at pas-technologies.com> wrote:

>
>        500+ WinXP desktop and laptop mix and 30 servers across three
> continents
>        Exchange 2007 (kinda screws up using Evolution at this point, and
> probably not switching anytime soon)
>        BES server
>        Office 2003/2007 mix with everyone running Outlook 2007 - need pivot
> tables to work in OOo spreadsheet
>        Vellum Graphite (has a *nix distro)
>        Currently implementing Sharepoint - would love to find an OS
> alternate for this
>        Access '97 database that must be accessible by about 45 users
>
>


-- 

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that
will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine
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