GNOME deployment update
I found another interesting GNOME deployment in a surprising
place – on a GNOME mailing list I didn’t know existed,
gnome-deployment-list.
The primary purpose of the list is to help people deploy GNOME, as opposed to tell people about GNOME deployments, but a year ago, this mail arrived on the list.
It tells the story of a medium sized Belgian company who almost completely abandoned Windows in favour of Debian machines running GNOME. The full details of the deployment, including the pre-migration analysis and the complete migration procedure, are available on the website of the Brussels LUG.
Their computing environment now runs over 65% of their desktop machines on GNU/Linux with GNOME, with estimated savings to the company of €22000.
Their main reason for migrating was not cost, however – it was a requirement for document interoperability. OOo solved this problem nicely, and Evolution and a free IMAP server allowed them to completely remove any Microsoft dependencies they had. The company is now (2 years on from their initial migration) running GNOME 2.6, with some GNOME 2.8 machines in testing.
The extraordinary thing about this story is that, as well as some professional consultancy for training and installation, the migration happened with the support and assistance of a local user’s group, acting out of a will to help, showing that user communities and private enterprise can work together.
Update:
A list of GNOME deployments is available in the GNOME wiki and it is getting pretty long (but not long enough! more inspirational stories needed!). It is also worth noting in this story that the external consultancy was provided by a local Belgian company, Beeznest, and not by a big international company. This aspect of Free Software (the fact that the skills are available locally, and profits feed the local economy) is something else which warms the cockles of my heart. Many thanks to Jérôme of Beeznest and BXLUG for putting together this account.
