1.2  Identifying suitable environments

Some customers such as large banking and insurance companies, public 

administrations, and the retail sector are pushing towards an Open Source 

based solution not only on servers, but also on their corporate desktops. As with 

all products, technologies or solutions, a "one size fits all" approach to the open 

source desktop will not be feasible in all cases. Critical questions need to be 

asked:

Is the customer s employee population strictly dependent on a third party 

application, plug in, or devices that are only supported on Windows?

Has the customer intensively developed custom applications based on native 

Win32 APIs and/or programming environments, such as Visual Basic or other 

Windows Scripting languages?

Is the customer s entire employee population dependent on Microsoft Office 

compatibility (for example, skills, file formats)?

If either answer is yes, then a Linux based solution is probably a less suitable 

alternative or a more complex (higher initial deployment cost) solution.

If your answer is no to the above questions, then the next step is to plan and 

execute a pilot migration (using this redbook as a planning guide). The results of 

the pilot migration should validate feasibility of production migration.

1.3  Strategic context

From a migration point of view, Linux is only one piece in the puzzle. Customers 

are faced with the problem of simplifying and optimizing existing end to end IT 

infrastructures, including servers, databases, applications, networks, systems 

management processes, and clients with the goal of reducing costs and 

complexities resulting in a stable foundation for growth and new solution 

deployment. 

All conversations should be about and around functions, not products or named 

features. Word processing has become a less known word, compared to 

Microsoft Word; even so, Word is just one single product, currently available on 

the Windows and Apple Macintosh platforms, to provide this function. Several 

packages are available on every platform to choose from.

Next, a desktop is almost never used without a larger environment to operate in; 

it connects to servers, storage, and printers. It uses not only the operating 

system, but also a wide range of middleware products, application packages, 

and might even require custom application development. It has to be deployed, 

supported, and managed. 

 Chapter 1. Introduction 

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