Ahoy, Part of my job at a small-ish (~40 people) sustainability charity involves managing the IT side of things. We have an outside company who provide a comprehensive support package on contract, with on-site support as well as telephone/email, and bags of useful assistance when purchasing new software and hardware. In fact, if we wanted my job could pretty much just be liasing with them.
Unfortunately we're a Windows-based outfit, and although everyone uses Firefox, PDFCreator and a few other "low hanging fruit" items it's impossible for me to migrate us to OpenOffice.org on Windows, Linux/BSD/Solaris on the server and indeed the full package with Linux desktops. In my dreams it would all be run off two servers with thin clients, sigh. I can't responsibly advocate such a switch because I can't find any companies who provide the kind of support we currently enjoy for free software. I summarised these frustrations late last year here: http://tom.acrewoods.net/node/497 Does anyone know of companies that I've missed, who fit the bill described in that blog entry? Anything from one-off support for migrations from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, to the full package, is of interest to me at the moment. I'm looking into this both for my job, and because I'm interested in writing it all up into an article if I get the time. Any research into the availability of people with my skills in managing free software systems would also be useful. Another reason I can't install too much free software, or get us a nice VM/dedicated server for our web sites, is the nightmare scenario of me leaving the organisation and them struggling to find someone with comparable skills who also does government policy work! Kind regards, Tom _______________________________________________ Fsfe-uk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fsfe-uk
