Re: Open Source Programs
Plainsman said:
We are moving to more open souce programs. 3 websites running on FC6 and apache. I am thinking of moving some users to open office, but the powerpoint is lame and can not use current access databases with open office.
MS licensing is so expensive is why we are going that way.
Great site dolluper!
I use Open Office. I use the Writer and Spreadsheet program mostly. It works fine for what I do. It has a lot of advanced features I don't know how to use. I think most people would be satisfied with it. I know there will be cases when somoene needs MS Office though.
I left out Email because that's a whole 'nother discussion. Thunderbird works great for me. But if someone's into using their Outlook Calendar, forget Thunderbird. Or if they have a PDA/Phone that syncs with Outlook, forget Thunderbird. If you're a supergeek you MIGHT get it to work. Most people don't have the patience and I don't blame them. I know there are also some open source alternatives to Exchange but I have no experience with them. Honestly, I think having Exchange is bad enough. Using an alternative Exchange client is scary. But I'm just speculating on that. I've been wrong and pleasantly surprised before.
I hate to bash Exchange so much, it's mostly due to 2 things. I used to run Exchange 5.5 on NT. Nuff said about that. In the market in which I work, customers are not willing to spend the money to implement it correctly. IOW, I'm not dumping Exchange on the already overworked DC. I'm not having the customers application be unavailable just because Exchange decides to take a crap.
As long as you don't need any proprietary Windows stuff on your web server Apache is awesome. You are smart to use it when you can, which I guess is true of any open source product.
