"In a move to save taxpayers hundreds of thousands of
dollars, the City of Largo is about to deploy an all-Linux
groupware solution for the west Florida community. In moving its
e-mail, calendars, and scheduling over to the new platform, the
"City of Progress" becomes one of the first major enterprises to
complete the journey to an all-Linux desktop.
Despite the prevailing wisdom that the Linux desktop is not
ready for prime time, Largo has already happily migrated 800 city
workers onto the KDE graphical desktop, deployed over an
inexpensive thin client network running Red Hat 7.2. With this next
step, Bynari's Insight messaging and collaboration tools will
replace the older UNIX system running Novell's GroupWise product.
The city also has a limited number of PCs running legacy
applications, but those too will be phased out as open source
replacements become available.
In an exclusive interview with ConsultingTimes, Largo's CIO
Harold Schomaker described how the city was initially looking to
upgrade and migrate their GroupWise system. 'Novell was going to
embrace Linux and write Linux clients. But all of a sudden that got
dropped.' Schomaker and his staff explored the possibility of
upgrading the existing GroupWise system to meet their needs, but
the customization costs were prohibitive."
