Mercian Labels-a UK SME Label Printer on Open Source migration

Last week I finally manage to get hold of a nokia E90 communicator, which has been the major holdup in my migration completely to open source. As I run my business a lot on the move, I decided early on that I needed to retain a mobile phone sync function that I had used for 4 years (nokia phones, PC sync and microsoft Outlook). The sticking point for me was that my current nokia 9500 communicator is not supported by zimbra mobile as its an old symbian operating system, so I needed to wait until the new E90 was launched to migrate away from outlook and windows XP.

Well after many delays, I got hold of one last week, and spent about 6-8 hours learning it, configuring it and migrating all my contacts and calendar across to zimbra ready to sync the new system.

Tasks included:

• migrating contacts and calendar from the 9500 by bluetooth, because my outlook PST file was so corrupt that I couldn’t export them to CSV’s or iCAL files.
• installing the nokia exchange software (nice to see nokia using php on their site!)
• redirecting my email to the new email address
• migrating all my email archive using IMAP to the zimbra server (which took a few hours)
• getting used to the zimbra interface
• exporting my outlook tasks (using copy and paste!) and importing them into Tooledo.com which I am using a temporary task manager until the next version of zimbra is released with task support.

Finally it was time to cermononiously turn off windows and reboot into ubuntu with all the business functionality I need to operate with open source as my sole software suite. God it felt good.

But, I reflected on the cost of this to date. Its been expensive in terms of time, very expensive. Probably a hundred plus hours of my time to get to this stage. Open source is great, reliable and cheaper in terms of license fees, but the migration is punishing.

Advice to new business startups is go with open source from the start - far better for compliance, functionality, reliability and cost saving. The more you get hooked into developing systems that are dedicated to microsoft, then the harder it is to get out of it. If you are considering open source as a short term cost saving exercise in your business and plan to use existing hardware or have special software, then my advice is dont. Have a long term strategy, or accept that its cheaper to stay with what you have.

That said, I dont regret the migration for a minute, and now I am the first person in the business running only open source software I will report on my experiences in the coming weeks before we start the roleout for all our other employees.

Its a great feeling to be free (in a very small individual user way) of the restricive, slow, unreliable xp/outlook configuration I USED to use!

Just a quick post to confirm to any future user that zimbra mobile works fine with the nokia e90.  Its a great piece of kit, and although there are annoying design “faults”, I havent come across anything yet that is problematic in relation to zimbra or open source software.  A most useful feature is the IMAP email polling/scheduled sync which works well.

To setup, follow these instructions.

We are giving a key presentation to our staff next week about the company wide migration to linux and open source.  This presenation is going to be critical to get the buy in and goodwill that we need to make the migration a sucess.

One of the ideas to generate some “goodwill” to fly the linux flag is the distribution of Tux penguin toys, clothing and other promotional merchandise across the workplace.

I’m finding it hard to find a decent supplier of this type of stuff in the UK who has a good range of products and offers some volume pricing.

Any ideas please?  If you are a seller, please add a comment with your url and  you can have a free link!

It was good to see this week that Dell are finally selling new PCs and Laptops with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled.

Jono Bacon has already blogged about his Dad buying one - I’ll be looking seriously at Dell’s offerings for our next round of hardware purchases.

Good decision Dell!

I’ve been checking what legancy applications I currently use in windows tat I dont already have a linux solutions for, and looking for linux replacements for the following 4 applications:

• winscp substitute to give a GUI SSH interface between linux machines (no substitute found)
• scanner.exe - a port scanner to check our internal network (no substitute found)
  
• dreamweaver (I’m planning on using Quanta Plus unless there is anything better?)
  
• seoelite (dies under WINE)

Please throw in a comment if you can suggest any possible solutions to explore. Thanks:)

I’ve wanted to say this for many months now. I am writing this post on a laptop thats now only running open source software!

HURAHH!!!

It has been a game, and I’m not quite fully there yet, but I’m now running the following:

• HP nx6125 laptop
• Ubuntu 7.04 Fesity Fawn
• Open Office
• Firefox
• Evolution email (interim until I move permanently to Zimbra in the next 2 weeks.)

To recount some of the problems I’ve had in the past week whilst migrating :

1. I had to buy a copy of Norton partition magic to create new partions on my drive for the linux swap and OS
2. let the automatic ubbuntu instalation package make the new partitions, if you do them manually the GRUB dual boot loader dosnt work (or it didnt for me as there was no “make bootable button”)
3. On first instalation I couldn’t get the wifi working, but cracked that this morning by reading the ubuntu forums
4. I had to learn how to export firefox bookmarks and resetup my firefox profile , plugins and settings
5. Setting up realplayer, or any software toview streaming video from the bbc website was a pain, but evenually got that going.
6. I didnt know that linux cannt read ntfs file systems, unless you install the appropriate package from the ubuntu universe. neadless to say, it works perfectly.
7. the forward and back microsoft optical mouse browser buttons dosn’t work, but worked using this tutorial

Lots of stuff works well that I was expecting problems with. .. battery managment, soundcards, skype, ethernet, SD card reader, CD reader, keyboard etc.

Outstanding issues are:

• I havent tried the CD burner yet, but I dont use that very often at all.
• bluetooth not tried yet.

Am very pleased and releived so far!

Picking up on the blogs of others (linux world and open source advocate), I am really pleased to hear of a new open source substitute for MS Project, a project management piece of software.

OPENPROJ is currently in beta, and runs cross patform using Java.  Now I’m not normally a fan of the common java software interface, but I’m looking forward to using this for my business R&D planning.

After previous discussions with Senokian about such software some weeks ago, I resorted to planning a current project using a gantt chart  using open office calc.  its OK, but coudl be better.

I hope that OPENPROJ works well for me, I’ll give it a go, but I’ve never used Project management software before.