[nzlug] Idea...

[Nevyn]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 10:42 PM, Simon Bridge <simonbridge at ihug.co.nz> wrote:
>
>  On Tue, 2008-03-25 at 19:57 +1300, Nick Taylor wrote:
>  > >> 1) MS support people may (perhaps) be more easily swappable parts than
>  > >> non-ms. The cost of a £400 an hour member of staff not working easily
>  > >> eclipses the cost of the software... and that's without getting into
>  > >> having to re-train every one.
>  >
>  > > One of things ECE noticed was that you got more seats per dollar out of
>  > > the unix admin than the ms admins - and the unix network is more
>  > > reliable - so, as they upscale, they've boon adding unix seats by
>  > > preference. (PS. I suspect someone has noticed that the unix guy seems
>  > > to have less work to do too... )
>  >
>  > That's the admin side - unless I'm much mistook, we were talking about
>  > desktops.
>  You were mistaken - the original "idea" was that a proportion of the
>  govt department savings resulting from a move to Free software could be
>  added as a bonus in the paypackets of the department employees. The
>  discussion moved to reasons why management would want to block this.
>
>
>  >
>  > I used to work in desktop support when we did the transition from win
>  > 3.1 to win 95. It wasn't too bad actually - in fact I don't think they
>  > actually retrained anyone - and I got my first support call... going up
>  > and sorting out printer settings, having never actually seen windows 95
>  > before, and this was for one of the big 4 accountancy firms in London.
>  >
>  Possibly - there is murmuring about retraining to use Vista. UK
>  education has a retraining thing about adoption in schools dosn't it?
>
>
>  > So maybe the transition to Linux could be done without a massive amount
>  > of retraining. I think I'd pilot it first though. Anyone know if these
>  > are going on anywhere? I'm kindof out of that loop these days.
>  >
>  When the UA Dept of Physics changed, over a holiday period, to RH7.2
>  (from NT) nobody noticed for about three months.
>
>  There is no reason a well introduced system requires retraining. But
>  this is not obvious a-priory... to the extent that I am making a small
>  living offering familiarization style courses. OTOH: home users have
>  different needs.
>
>  The number one thing keeping people on XP is that they don't want to
>  have to learn something new on top of all their other pressures.
>
>  Training needs to be intelligently handled...
>  For the corporate user, put them behind a fully configured box and show
>  them they can still do what they are used to and they're happy.

The hard bit in this case is trying to get the user to define what it
is they do in the first instance...

I'm of the opinion that using going to centralized application servers
serving up using a Citrix like system i.e. X Windows with a few
optimizations and mingx on a Windows desktop helps mitigate these
problems as the guy in the cubicle next door probably has the same
requirements of their applications. Thus you can make changes to a
subset of servers and it benefits all the users who have the same
needs. Sort of a filling in the gaps approach. The desktop hasn't
changed... yet. Users are then getting used to Linux without a
precieved major learning curve.

The best part, it's only 1 application at a time.

Changing to a Linux desktop once users have gotten used to the
applications is trivial at that point except for people maybe
complaining that the steps to change their background is slightly
different. Never mind the fact that the change from XP to Vista is
probably much the same scenario.