Linux applications for small/medium business?

[LarryH]

Does anyone have some good examples of using Linux for small/medium business (&lt;1000 employees or so) applications? <br>
I'm looking for typical / popular scenarios where Linux is being used.<br>
In the decision process to use Linux, what other OS was not chosen and why?<br>
<br>
Thanks

 

[gdeyoung]

There are a number of reasons to migrate to LINUX and some reasons not to. It really depends on what platforms your shop has standardized on. I'm looking into Caldera OpenLinux 2.2. This will work well for us because of its built in Novell NDS client. It also has a complete graphical bootup and login that takes them straight into KDE. But the real question revolves around your users. What applications do most of your users use? How computer literate are they? If most of your users do e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and such then LINUX is evolving into a very robust desktop PC OS. Their are a number of Office suites out there. Like Star Office, ApplixWare, Koffice, AbiWord. Corel is set to release Word Perfect 2000 office for Linux in a couple of months. They are also going to release their own distribution using Debian, KDE, and Word Perfect Office 2000 late summer early fall. Their is also rumors that Microsoft has a 40 programmer team working on porting MS Office to Linux.<br>
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Another bright spot over the horizon in Novell is going to release NDS 8.0 for Linux. This will let a IS department manage distributed LINUX servers more cost effectivly. There are other bright spots, Oracle is set to release 8i for Linux, IBM is going to port there JAVA based WebSphere application server to Linux. IBM has also made a pact with Pacific HiTech to merge their TurboLinux with IBM's DB2 database. With work to port most of IBM's middleware products buy the end of the year. This also means that Tivoli will be ported to Linux, and very capable enterprise management system.<br>
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The one place where LINUX may not fit is if you have alot of custom written applications. Thaey would have to be ported to Linux at probably a significant cost or ported to Web based applications. In addition, if you rely on off the shelf applications that are not available on Linux then you would have look for other solutions.<br>
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I think as the year goes on that there will be even more reasons to lost hard at Linux, and less reasons not to. Only time will tell.<br>
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Hope this helps,<br>
Greg