From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 25 7:21:26 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dire.bris.ac.uk (dire.bris.ac.uk [137.222.10.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A4DA937B440 for ; Mon, 25 Feb 2002 07:20:23 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk by dire.bris.ac.uk with SMTP-PRIV with ESMTP; Mon, 25 Feb 2002 15:20:16 +0000 Received: from cmjg (helo=localhost) by mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 3.16 #1) id 16fMv1-0004TE-00; Mon, 25 Feb 2002 15:19:59 +0000 Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 15:19:58 +0000 (GMT) From: Jan Grant X-X-Sender: cmjg@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk To: johann@broadpark.no Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, bsd Subject: Re: Presentation of UNIX to an ignorant crowd In-Reply-To: <1014648629.3c7a4f35eab24@mail.broadpark.no> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, 25 Feb 2002 johann@broadpark.no wrote: > Hi. > > I'm about to hold a lecture on UNIX to people who don't even have the faintest > idea of what it's all about. > > The utter perimeter of their knowledge halts at performing government-related > tasks in Windows 98. > > My job is to convince them that UNIX -- using Mandrake on workstations and > FreeBSD on servers -- is the way to go. In other words teach them the truth, > and make them convert. > > I was assigned to this job on a rather short notice, and therefore I havn't > really had time to do the thorough research part myself. > > I was wondering, however, if such a thing (general presentation of UNIX, its > movements up and till now and the various benefits it may serve). My knowledge > is filled with black holes that might twist out during this presentation, which > is why I was hoping that this could be of assistance. If you're certain that the required apps are there, don't tell: show. Eg: this is mandrake with kde and openoffice. These files it's using are being served by FreeBSD using (pick one: samba, etc). Include costs (TCO) if you can calculate them. A lot of what you want depends on what "government-related" work is; in particular, if they've got any bespoke apps you need to know that they'll work in your proposed environment. Otherwise you'll just generate resentment, excessive costs and an eventual rollback*. You may well have to answer questions like this: - can we still use Outlook/Exchange? - what do you expect to offer instead of those? - what will the training costs for a change be? - can we interoperate with other departments that still use Windows? If you don't have good answers for this then you might wish to bide your time and do something a little less dramatic: piecemeal successes win support; one spectacular failure will not be forgotten. jan * Which might be standard for governmental projects, depending on your country of choice - I make no comment :-) -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk Semantic rules, OK? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message