[TYPO3-UG US] Typo3 Support In Seattle?

[Alex Heizer]

Hi Stan,

Microsoft seems to cut a wide swath no matter where you are in the US. I 
helped a local nonprofit move from two NT4 servers to Linux over a year 
ago for a couple of reasons and their ROI was better than anything I've 
seen in published reports from either OS camp. They didn't care who the 
vendor was, they were just in need of their stuff to work and didn't 
have any extra money available.

Michelle and I had volunteered to do the org's website into T3, and 
thought they would do well with the system. We don't use workflows in 
it, but we have a lot of extensions set up for them, including user 
logins, a resource directory, calendar, news, Flash slideshow, Direct 
Mail and the CHC forum (you can see it at http://www.thepccp.org ). As 
we were in the process of working on their site, their IT/everyman 
employee left and they called us to see if there was something we could 
do to help out. I went over and they explained the situation: their 
photo/file server had gone down, their main PDC/file/email server had 
problems and needed to be reset regularly, and when they got a quote for 
a new server it was for approximately $12,000. Since that one server's 
cost was almost some of their employee's yearly salary it was out of the 
question whether they would buy it or not. When I took a look at their 
current resources I discovered they had 2 Dell PowerEdge 800MHz Xeon 
servers with 256MB of RAM that were doing nothing (almost capable enough 
to run as NT servers), and their current NT servers (which had been 
"obseleted" by MS a few months before) were just a couple of white boxes 
that had been thrown together. A lot of their files were being stored 
locally on the desktops, and email was being downloaded regularly to the 
PDC machine so that they could check their email locally using Outlook 
and MS Mail. Upgrading the server would also bring on a MS Exchange 
licensing cost, too, for around 30 employees. Each of their desktops had 
a different Windows install, making troubleshooting and maintenance a 
nightmare, since each desktop had to go through a discovery period to 
determine how it was set up. I suggested they let me set up the 
PowerEdges as file servers and retire the WinNT PDC as soon as 
practical, and get every desktop onto a common install.

After a weekend, I had both Dell's set up with Linux, new 120GB hard 
drives, connectivity and authentication through Samba (and eventually 
PDC services), and the second server providing nightly synchronization 
to the first for redundancy. The NT machine continued to provide PDC 
capabilities and email for a while, but soon I had set up another Linux 
gateway on an old Gateway e1000 desktop machine to provide DNS, DHCP, 
NAT and firewall services. We also moved their email to the same server 
that we were developing their website on, which is a Linux server.

Net result: within the office, they have three servers that have had 
zero maintenance issues for 14 months. Having been used to regular 
reboots of the NT servers, a few of the staff had rebooted the servers a 
few times on their own, but the issues have since been traced to faulty 
building wiring and network hubs (which were replaced by switches and 
new patch cabling). They have nightly backups, and all data is now saved 
to the network, allowing them to replace desktops at any time without 
downtime to the staff, and since the Linux servers act as PDC's, none of 
the staff even notice or care that their file servers aren't NT. But 
they sure do notice that their servers are available every day. Outlook 
was replaced with Mozilla Thunderbird to provide IMAP mail service, and 
the T-Bird calendar synchronizes with their TYPO3 website so that any 
event appears on the site as soon as any employee enters it into their 
desktop calendar. For that, Michelle set up phpicalendar on the server 
to parse events from the calendar files to the site. We also added 
Firefox to every desktop to eliminate many of I.E.'s security issues.

Side benefits: Linux servers require no CALs, meaning an unlimited 
number of users without per-seat licensing costs. Approximately 5 hours 
a month maintenance on the servers, which always turns out to be 
building wiring or desktop-related. No full-time employee salaries to 
troubleshoot and maintain their Windows network, as they'd needed in the 
past. And the Windows virus that appeared on the servers from a careless 
user had absolutely no effect on the servers' security. It was cleaned 
up mostly on their monthly support contract while everyone in the office 
continued to work without interruption.

This may or may not help you to try to convince people of the ROI of 
open source, especially with so many MS-funded "independent" studies 
that rely on 5-year-old open source data to prove that their new 
products are "equal" to open source software. But for this nonprofit, 
they've come out ahead of anything MS could have offered them at any price.

Cheers!
Alex


Stan Orchard wrote:
> On Apr 24, 2006, at 5:37 PM, Marc Infield wrote:
> 
>> As for licensing none of the NGOs we have done work for have
>> required, or even been particularly interested in open source. I
>> attribute this partially to our clients not being very technical and
>> also Microsoft's generous licensing of it's products to 501c3s.
> 
> 
> This is at the heart of my dilemma. Microsoft, being local, carves a  
> wide swath. Guess they do that everywhere, but especially here. But  
> we'll get there. Thanks very much for the feedback.
> 
> StanO