Converting a Business to Linux Desktop - Chris Titus Tech
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Date: 2022-03-21
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Comments and reviews: 10
yvrelna
There's one mindset that you may not be needing. I find that many smaller businesses often consider it Ok to just give people full control over their machine and not do much configuration management on them. Just set the machine on autoupdate and trust the users to manage their own systems. Put your security on the internal network instead in a way that does not rely on individual machine's/employee's security. In smaller business that is about 50-100 or less people, and where the average employees have good computer literacy, it can be cheaper and easier to just handle the occasional issues that crops up manually, rather than dealing with fully automating configuration management.
The reason businesses often are concerned about restricting access on Windows systems is because if you don't do that, it is way too easy on Windows to get malware that can infect the whole business and cause various havocs to the business. This concern is practically non-existent when you migrate to a Linux or Mac based environment, and you have the option to just empower your employees to self-manage their system. Yes, you'll get the occasional someone hosing their machine and having to clean up their mess, but the benefit is a more motivated employees as they feel that they can setup their machine to their liking rather than being restricted by IT policies that prevents them from optimizing their workflows.
When you follow this kind of principle, you'd have to be aware that it does not mean that you don't have security. It just means that you put more security on your servers, keep backups that make it possible to undo damages done by individual employees, put access restriction on the servers, educate your employee about not sharing credentials, etc.
This style of IT management does not work on all businesses, but you may find a lot of environments where it works just fine. You should evaluate your business whether or not this style of IT management would work. This works well especially with highly computer literate departments; people in the development/tech departments for example, would likely appreciate having full control over their machines rather than having to work red tapes to get what they needed. In cases where their machines are Linux/Mac, where accidental infection is rare, and the employees are fairly capable of managing their own system, it would often work just fine to let them do so.
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There's one mindset that you may not be needing. I find that many smaller businesses often consider it Ok to just give people full control over their machine and not do much configuration management on them. Just set the machine on autoupdate and trust the users to manage their own systems. Put your security on the internal network instead in a way that does not rely on individual machine's/employee's security. In smaller business that is about 50-100 or less people, and where the average employees have good computer literacy, it can be cheaper and easier to just handle the occasional issues that crops up manually, rather than dealing with fully automating configuration management.
The reason businesses often are concerned about restricting access on Windows systems is because if you don't do that, it is way too easy on Windows to get malware that can infect the whole business and cause various havocs to the business. This concern is practically non-existent when you migrate to a Linux or Mac based environment, and you have the option to just empower your employees to self-manage their system. Yes, you'll get the occasional someone hosing their machine and having to clean up their mess, but the benefit is a more motivated employees as they feel that they can setup their machine to their liking rather than being restricted by IT policies that prevents them from optimizing their workflows.
When you follow this kind of principle, you'd have to be aware that it does not mean that you don't have security. It just means that you put more security on your servers, keep backups that make it possible to undo damages done by individual employees, put access restriction on the servers, educate your employee about not sharing credentials, etc.
This style of IT management does not work on all businesses, but you may find a lot of environments where it works just fine. You should evaluate your business whether or not this style of IT management would work. This works well especially with highly computer literate departments; people in the development/tech departments for example, would likely appreciate having full control over their machines rather than having to work red tapes to get what they needed. In cases where their machines are Linux/Mac, where accidental infection is rare, and the employees are fairly capable of managing their own system, it would often work just fine to let them do so.
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akurenda1985
If you're publishing apps with correct licensing through the server, are you really -saving- all that much money on licensing? I mean, they already have all of the Volume Licenses to have the machines on Windows in the first place for imaging. So essentially, you wouldn't save anything and just be wasting a bunch of volume licenses. Assuming they didn't have volume licensing and just had OEM machines (Most big companies that sell in bulk still have OEM keys applied), you're still just NOT using the license. Unless you're talking about CAL licenses for devices/users. Zentyal would get around that. But essentially you'd still want a Windows machine to manage the advanced domain controller features from Zentyal, trying to use the web interface for AD Users and Groups functions is asinine.
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If you're publishing apps with correct licensing through the server, are you really -saving- all that much money on licensing? I mean, they already have all of the Volume Licenses to have the machines on Windows in the first place for imaging. So essentially, you wouldn't save anything and just be wasting a bunch of volume licenses. Assuming they didn't have volume licensing and just had OEM machines (Most big companies that sell in bulk still have OEM keys applied), you're still just NOT using the license. Unless you're talking about CAL licenses for devices/users. Zentyal would get around that. But essentially you'd still want a Windows machine to manage the advanced domain controller features from Zentyal, trying to use the web interface for AD Users and Groups functions is asinine.
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Spanner_Man
Chris, the one manufacturer for printers that have a -95% chance for working for a small business is HP Laser printer range. Most of the HP laser multifunction series have a build in mini SMTP/POP3 clent so when you scan you can have what you scanned sent to an email address. That email server could be self hosted too. As to sending and receiving faxes you can have it setup to auto send faxes to an email address. To send a fax from computer usually the subject line is the outgoing fax number, and the attachments (usually open doc format/basic pdf v.1.1) will be sent to the outgoing fax.
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Chris, the one manufacturer for printers that have a -95% chance for working for a small business is HP Laser printer range. Most of the HP laser multifunction series have a build in mini SMTP/POP3 clent so when you scan you can have what you scanned sent to an email address. That email server could be self hosted too. As to sending and receiving faxes you can have it setup to auto send faxes to an email address. To send a fax from computer usually the subject line is the outgoing fax number, and the attachments (usually open doc format/basic pdf v.1.1) will be sent to the outgoing fax.
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Mike
HI Chris, I've been researching for the same kind of goal of what you are doing too, interested to see what you present for Resource sharing and Restrictions. As you said so many options, and I look forward to see what you are presenting. I've looked at Zentyal in the past.. it was originally designed as a replacement to the Windows Small Business server line when MS ended that line of servers. AD and GPO for Windows domains and Windows workstations, but it's probably evolved lots over the years since I last looked at it.
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HI Chris, I've been researching for the same kind of goal of what you are doing too, interested to see what you present for Resource sharing and Restrictions. As you said so many options, and I look forward to see what you are presenting. I've looked at Zentyal in the past.. it was originally designed as a replacement to the Windows Small Business server line when MS ended that line of servers. AD and GPO for Windows domains and Windows workstations, but it's probably evolved lots over the years since I last looked at it.
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Herbert
This is an interesting topic i've been pondering myself. I come from a sysadmin background in the smb market, and i hated every waking minute of people asking me to fix some piece of software that broke because of an update or poor performance. I was looking for a business plan to make Linux available to small companies, who have maybe up to 50 employees. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, so I can borrow some insight from you. :)
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This is an interesting topic i've been pondering myself. I come from a sysadmin background in the smb market, and i hated every waking minute of people asking me to fix some piece of software that broke because of an update or poor performance. I was looking for a business plan to make Linux available to small companies, who have maybe up to 50 employees. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with, so I can borrow some insight from you. :)
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Paul
I've dabbled with this in the past looking at using Ubuntu in a company I used to work for where I was the IT Admin, from memory I got stuck with calendar sharing, but now the company has moved to google mail, so all email and calendar stuff got taken care of in the browser. I think centralized user credentials is a big one, don't want stolen company laptops to be able to log straight in without authentication.
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I've dabbled with this in the past looking at using Ubuntu in a company I used to work for where I was the IT Admin, from memory I got stuck with calendar sharing, but now the company has moved to google mail, so all email and calendar stuff got taken care of in the browser. I think centralized user credentials is a big one, don't want stolen company laptops to be able to log straight in without authentication.
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Thomas
what i need for my office girl is a different a alternative to POS , :-lol point of sell- i can run POS on wine32 , but has graphical bugs wen i program a gui for her , and is harder to move recites (digital)... to quick-books and h&r block (more work-load) ... an idea for a viedo , i could use a business Linux GUI, i do have my (7 cam's )CC system running on manjaro (for live stream to .bak server)
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what i need for my office girl is a different a alternative to POS , :-lol point of sell- i can run POS on wine32 , but has graphical bugs wen i program a gui for her , and is harder to move recites (digital)... to quick-books and h&r block (more work-load) ... an idea for a viedo , i could use a business Linux GUI, i do have my (7 cam's )CC system running on manjaro (for live stream to .bak server)
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David
I'm looking forward to this. As a long time Linux user working in a Windows world, I was always wondering how to integrate Linux desktop into a Windows environment.
Chris, my question is: do you have any practical experience with this? Have you done any conversions in real life? I'd be very interested in the -gotchas- that crop up during the rollout and any weirdnesses that happen afterwards.
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I'm looking forward to this. As a long time Linux user working in a Windows world, I was always wondering how to integrate Linux desktop into a Windows environment.
Chris, my question is: do you have any practical experience with this? Have you done any conversions in real life? I'd be very interested in the -gotchas- that crop up during the rollout and any weirdnesses that happen afterwards.
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Kyle
Awesome Chris I'm stoked. I work at a small business with basically zero IT everyone's left to fend for themselves. I have some unix sysadmin experience, whenever I suggest implementing enterprise solutions I get shot down. After your series I might be able to pitch a Linux for businesses case that will get some traction.
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Awesome Chris I'm stoked. I work at a small business with basically zero IT everyone's left to fend for themselves. I have some unix sysadmin experience, whenever I suggest implementing enterprise solutions I get shot down. After your series I might be able to pitch a Linux for businesses case that will get some traction.
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Linux
Hey; Smart; Start from the top, instead from the bottom up. Looking forward to all of this. Will help after I know where you heading with all of this. So my commits might be small and might be referent or knock out of left field. But, will try to stay in the boundaries of your teaching.
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Hey; Smart; Start from the top, instead from the bottom up. Looking forward to all of this. Will help after I know where you heading with all of this. So my commits might be small and might be referent or knock out of left field. But, will try to stay in the boundaries of your teaching.
reply
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