I am rather lucky that I have moved them to open office about 12 months ago with only minor headaches(and it can open office 2007) (it was actually this move that lead to the linuxification in the first place, and a guts full of windows being crap) as far as weird software goes there is just heaps, but for the time being those machines are field instruments and will be keeping windows, do tools exist for importing emails etc from exchange/outlook express to linux mail clients?

Cheers

Andrew

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Daniel Lawson <daniel@meta.net.nz> wrote:

> hi
>
> I am preparing to GNU/Linuxify my fathers business, is there anything
> i should be aware of?


If you're replacing his server, then not really. Samba will do
everything you need for a windows domain controller. You can get clever
and do things from LDAP, but it's not required for a basic system.

If you're talking about his desktops, then be very careful that he
doesn't have any custom windows applications that he relies on, or
websites that require activeX controls. �These may work via WINE, but
test *before* you start any deployment.

You'll almost definitely be changing office suites, so be prepared for
the inevitable "I can't open Office 2007 documents" type of question.

In general, users resist change. There's always exceptions, but be
prepared for people resisting the change ("it used to work like XYZ, why
can't it do that now?" "Can't we have the old system back?" etc). Plan
some decent training and set aside time to do it.

If the office suite / web browser / email client you're planning on
moving them to has windows versions (eg, like openoffice, firefox and
thunderbird do), then consider moving people onto these applications
first, perhaps one application at a time, and then changing the OS later.
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