Linux at work (real world)

[KMcLauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com]

Greetings earth creatures... and you tech writers, too...

A Friday-afternoon bull-session with our IT crew revealed 
that they are actively beginning to look into the possibility 
of getting Linux onto the corporate desktop. We're on NT, and 
good ole Bill just pissed us off once again by pressuring us 
to upgrade when our little budget isn't ready. Worse, we'd be 
upgrading to 2K (which is what we wanted... just not for a 
few more months, thankyew), for which support is to be 
discontinued in three years. 

I didn't get the entire text of the response as our IT manager 
contemplated being forced to adopt XP, with its compulsory 
"re-negotiate with MS whenever you change the hardware in a PC" 
makework policy... but the gist of it was "No, no, no, and NO! 
You can't make me!"  Or something like that.

Anyway, I've heard from several sources that Star-Office has 
topnotch Word filtering (both directions)-- a couple of 
quickie tests sorta confirmed it for me -- and that the suite 
is XML-based. 

I've tinkered just a little with K-Office at home, and it 
too is XML-ish. K-Word also uses concepts familiar to a 
FrameMaker user, like me.

So, all of this is looking tasty.

BUT...

Do ANY of you have experience with using Linux and these 
desktop apps in multi-person offices? Not just lone 
gun(wo)men, but some of you herd animals, too?

Have they got usable tools for scheduling and planning 
by groups? 
I know I could use either of StarOffice or K-Office to 
write documents, create and publish spreadsheets, create 
presentations, create and manipulate vector or bitmap 
graphics, publish web-stuff, send, receive and manage 
e-mail, etc.  But, can an office full of MS-Office users 
find/view each other's calendars, schedule meetings 
(including booking the conference rooms and A/V equipment), 
plan (and SHARE the planning of) projects, if they switch 
to a Linux desktop?

I think we could demand that our people put up with quite 
a lot of one-time transition pain if:

a) we could populate 80+ desktops for a few hundred, 
   or a few thousand dollars (total, not each)

b) we could count on having the majority of our 
   (*)necessary tasks supported.

Certainly, I wouldn't mind using the same tools that 
the rest of the office uses (in some ways, it's nice 
to be exclusive with FrameMaker, but in others, it 
can be a pain to march to my lonely drum).

My impression is that the individual (Linux) apps 
have matured to the point where they can hold their own 
with MS Office (as recently as last year, I would not 
have been comfortable with that statement). But, I'm 
not in a position to know about the "groupware" aspects.

Is the productive Linux desktop still the province of 
the loner, or can some of you vouch for it in a group 
setting, now? (Please say yes!  :-)

Naturally, as a person who might have some influence 
on which direction our company might take, I'd also 
appreciate your opinions on the preferred path from a 
tech-writer's perspective. If we were to pilot a 
desktop and a set of apps, which one should I plump 
for? And why? 

Let's ignore my current use of FrameMaker as a 
consideration.  I'll just have to hope that the 
suite that would be best for the rest of the company 
would also be the best for their one-and-only 
tech-writer.

Thanks for any and all constructive observations.
Also for any destructive and petty ones that happen to be 
witty...   

I'm interested in first-hand (or whatever I can get) 
observations either from people who HAVE a working 
office of ten or more people who use Outlook-like 
features in Linux, or from an office where you're 
doing a trial with enough people to make a realistic 
assessment.

Speak up, you case-studies! Make yourselves heard!  :-)

Regards,

Kevin McLauchlan
Techwriterthinginchief
Chrysalis-ITS, Inc.
Ottawa, ON, Canada

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