Linux development concerns - M$ compatibility

[biot023]

Hallo - I've been looking into creating various control systems for our company, and really want to go the open-source route wherever possible.
However, I have been asked by a developer associated with our company if this is a good idea for the following reasons:
We will want to develop automated sales/reporting/work process systems that will need to be integrated to other services over the net, but also locally to the company, which runs on Windows 2000 server & all the local machines run on XP. He also mentioned something called CRM systems.

Whilst I would dearly like to defend the open-source approach, I'd really need to know I was doing the right thing. Are such worries valid, or could this be a knee-jerk reaction of someone trained on all the M$ stuff?
Any & all input very gratefully received,
doug.


If I had a hammer...

 

[Castor66]

We have a combination of systems in our company. I am an open-source fan and use it wherever possible. The integration isn't as difficult as you would expect between open-source and proprietary. It really comes down to a lot of import/export routines. For our project management.time management we use eGroupware (PHP + SQLServer) which suffices for pretty much all we need to do. For our accounts we are looking at a low-end SAP solution but this will still need to be integrated with our POS system which is ASP/.NET running on Windows with SQLServer. This is a non-trivial task to do this integration and that is all Windows.

Open-source is not the problem - it's the integration between applications. The headache is there no matter what platform(s) you choose.