* Novell slowly migrating Windows desktops to Linux, according to reports
There was a story in an Australian IT magazine (see link below) last week about Novell’s migration of its corporate desktop computers from Windows to Linux. According to the story, Novell was running behind schedule.
At last spring’s BrainShare conference in Salt Lake City, Novell CIO Debra Anderson revealed she’d been charged with migrating 5,000 Novell employees to Linux by BrainShare 2005. Half were due to be moved by October. But so far, according to the news article, only 1,500 have been moved which means the company is 1,000 short of its interim goal. Novell’s director of Linux, Brian Green, is quoted as saying that Novell hopes to get the vast majority of employees migrated to Linux by year-end. That seems to be quite ambitious.
While some might think that the need to retrain people could be slowing down progress, Green said that because Novell’s employees are relatively tech savvy training wasn’t a major issue. He added, evidently with a straight face (but possibly with tongue in cheek) that marketing was the only department which had needed extensive training.
Novell is spending a good deal of time documenting its move and developing guidelines so that it can advise its customers better about how and when to migrate as well as the degree of migration needed. Not everyone should move 100% of their desktops to Linux, according to Green. Depending on your circumstances, it might even make sense to stay with Windows desktops for most users for the near term. Especially for those using Microsoft technologies that, as yet, have no open source equivalents.
Still, by only partially moving to Linux you could increase your support costs beyond the savings you make in operating systems and applications. While Linux may not require as many support persons as Windows (and that still isn’t proven, especially in non-tech savvy organizations) having multiple operating systems means having a higher ratio of techs to users for each.
Nowhere in the article, though, was it revealed why the migration target hasn’t been met so far. While I was trying to figure out what the holdup might be, a note from a reader dropped into my inbox and it might be the key to the problem Novell was having. We’ll explore that in the next issue.
