I had some very good news today. I am to be working for most of my time for probably 6 months or more on alternative desktop solutions, looking at what the viable alternatives are to the Microsoft Desktop solution. This is an end to end review, ie not just looking at the Operating System, but at:
- The operating system
- The layered personal productivity tools
- Integration with peripherals and PDA's
- The service and systems management tools
- The security tools
- The integration issues
- Application compatability and portfolio migration issues
- The data and personality migration issues
- The TCO issues
- The user change/culture change issues
- Changes to my companies service model and associated technologies
- Some of the issues that result from running a mixed environment, or a parallel environment, for example VMware hosted
- The architectural changes, eg thick or thin client, application delivery approaches
- Some of the strategic differences including those that arise from the different motivations of Microsoft and the alternatives
- The decision making process that a client needs to go through before choosing to go the alternative route
I won't be posting much more detail than this in my blog, but you can expect some of the key questions that I am asking myself to be posted along the way as I try and pick my way through such a lot of different factors. Its quite interesting to be starting work on this just a day after my posting on Zealots!
If you look at my blog on posts related to this topic, these are the most important:
Zealots
Rich Versus Reach - my perspective
Personal Information Disaster!
Which Office Suite?
Microsoft: Linux isn't cheaper
More integration of Microsoft Products?
Who will Longhorn appeal to?
In pursuit of personal and team productivity
2:33:08 PM 
|
