JDPFu.com 2025

Show your CEO the cost savings between Microsoft solutions (MS-Office, Exchange, AD, CALs) as you propose replacing them with Open Source Software, OSS, that include commercial support.

• MS-Exchange —> Zimbra
• MS-Exchange Calendaring —> Zimbra
• MS-Active Directory —> OpenLDAP
• MS-Outlook —> whatever client you like that’s free; Try Thunderbird or whatever Apple gives away or Enlightenment
• MS-Sharepoint —> Alfresco
• Shared Drives —> Samba and/or Alfresco
• MS-Print Servers —> Samba/CUPS with printer driver support
• MS-Office —> OpenOffice

Add up all that you’re paying for this stuff. Spend 2 hours researching what commercial support for the FOSS stuff costs – estimate $15k for each except those items that just work like OO, Samba and OpenLDAP.

Enough said? No? Ok, use Xen to host all these things. Your disk costs for EMC/NetApp/Whatever won’t change. Your clustering costs will require consultants … 1 time to setup until your team becomes knowledgeable.

Hardware? Use this as the call to virtualization that your organization needs already. When you’re all done, you’ll have half as many servers as before. You’ll probably save many, many more in actuality.

Training? When the CEO shares the overall cost savings with his team and it gets out to the every day workers, they may still complain a little, but they were complaining about MS stuff before.

Outcomes:

• huge cost savings for very minor changes to capability – you’ll need to judge that for yourself
• 2x hardware (or more) reduction
• ongoing software license costs cut by over 50% (just the MS stuff here – this doesn’t save on your CRM, SAS, Oracle costs)
• No Vista upgrade looming
• No desktop CAL and no desktop MS-Office licenses; well, you’ll probably have to retain a few. Or perhaps the CEO will mandate 1 Exchange server for him and his team, but everyone else needs to migrate to Zimbra.

Further, if you can replace WinXP with Linux (not everyone can), you’ll see

• No more “hardware is too slow” upgrades
• “Hardware broken” replacement cycle every 5-7 years
• Employees will use work computers for work, since the same programs they use at home won’t run without tinkering at work.
• There are many, many excellent FOSS programs that businesses use today. MS-IIS —> Apache; PBX —> Asterisk; many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, others.
• WINE will run many, many Win32 programs.

All of these replacements have support contracts available, so there is strong commercial support, should you need it. OTOH, if you have a small team of experts, you can probably get the FOSS versions up and running in less than a week and never need to pay anyone for support outside your current staff. This is idea for proof of concepts and other trials. If you are an enterprise looking for support, that’s fine – compare $15k-$30k per year to what ever you’re currently paying MS. I worked at a place where we paid MS over $5M/yr in support and licenses just for desktops (OS, MS-Office, CALs, AD).

Best of all, all those replacements don’t require MS-Windows. They work with whatever clients you like … well, that isn’t entirely true. Zimbra FOSS doesn’t do any calendaring with Outlook 2003 and perhaps 2007. Is that a bad thing?

Lastly, use this swap as a way to improve the way your company does things. Don’t just replace shared folders with samba – use a document management system like Alfresco and migrate users into it. To start, they can use it just like shared folders. Over time, you’ll get better as it and implement triggers for when documents arrive or leave the system. For example, you can have every document loaded into directory XYZ automatically converted into HTML and dropped into another folder. Or implement document review work flows. Start small but grow into the full capabilities.

The key thing with all these solutions is that the data is yours. It isn’t locked up in some proprietary format.

• Don’t like Alfresco? Connect to the repository with CIFS and copy all the documents out and load them into Documentum or back to shared drives.
• Don’t like Zimbra? The message store is just IMAP. Calendars can be exported with ICS. Contacts can be exported too. I haven’t found where the distribution lists and aliases are stored, but the DBs are OpenLDAP and MySQL. How tough will it be?

Whatever … it’s your data.

I feel bad for those who can’t throw MS completely out for whatever reason. For example, many of the telephony, scanning and fax servers only run on Win32 servers and only connect with Exchange.

Blackberry users – take heart – Zimbra has a Blackberry interface. Many other smartphones also have interfaces and there is a generic J2ME interface for all the rest.

How to install Zimbra on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS