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"Linux switch saved city millions and reduced user complaints"
- icebraining 15y agoThe article says it's based on Ubuntu, but the LiMux page linked by it says it's based on Debian (Sarge, no less, which is ancient nowadays).
- Argorak 15y agoSince LiMux 3, its Ubuntu. https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/files/DS2011_LiMux_Desktop_Retrospective_2011-08-08.pdf https://www.desktopsummit.org/sites/www.desktopsummit.org/fi... They are now on 10.04.
- keithpeter 15y agoShould be fun when they upgrade to 12.04. And I say that as one who quite likes Unity
- Argorak 15y agoIts not a standard Ubuntu. For example, they use KDE 3 :).
- keithpeter 15y agoWell, they'll have to change that for 12.04 unless they compile their own!
- ktizo 15y agoYou don't have to use unity on ubuntu 12.04, for instance, I tend to use LXDE.
- Xylakant 15y agoWell, they do have an IT department with staff competent enough to make a linux migration. I guess they do have an appropriate rollout management to compile and deploy KDE without much hassle. I wouldn't worry about that.
- keithpeter 15y agoI'm sure they do, but isn't KDE 3.5 obsolete? They would have to take on the maintenance and security updates themselves...
- vibrunazo 15y agoOn a parallel anecdote. Installing Ubuntu on my parents PC sure did reduce the amount of assistance they needed from me with crashes and malware. I'd recommend it to anyone who needs to spend some time helping non-tech friends with computer problems :)
- maarty 15y agoAgree. I Installed Ubuntu to my girlsfrind and it was running 1 year without destruction. On the other hand I've taken away administration priviledges from my dads windows 7 and its holding pretty well ...
- rbanffy 15y agoFor my wife, I advised a move to Mac. She needed perfect MS Office compatibility for professional reasons and the computers are much prettier.
- mjwalshe 15y agoAnd much more expensive :-) and if you want 100% Office comapatability for work by a PC.
- Uchikoma 15y agoCould you show how a DELL or HP is much cheaper? I did a calculation in 2006, comparing a Lenovo T60p to a MacBook Pro, it was roughly the same. Things did not change since then to my knowledge. http://codemonkeyism.com/the-recent-lenovo-vs-apple-discussion-i-dont-get-it/ http://codemonkeyism.com/the-recent-lenovo-vs-apple-discussi...
- rbanffy 15y agoAnd don't forget to factor in the anti-malware package, the extra gigabyte of memory it'll take, the beefier processor it will demand and the beefier battery you'll need to run the whole thing. No. The Mac is cheaper in the end.
- duncans 15y agoFor counter arguments there's some fascinating stuff at http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/ http://limuxwatch.blogspot.co.uk/ although it hasn't been updated for a while, so maybe they've finally succeeded?
- tosseraccount 15y ago"Watching the city of Munich fail to convert to Linux" At least they post their bias upfront. Sounds like a disgruntled vendor.
- mattbriggs 15y agoYeah, if you read that site you'll see that the Munich switch was really mismanaged and underestimated. This press release sounds more like pr spin then anything, since they we supposed to be done a very long time ago
- st0p 15y agoIf every large IT project would be regarded as failed because it was delivered late, the chances of a successfull project would approach zero.
- Xylakant 15y agoActually, the article is not based on a press release. The original document is a response of the cities administration to a question brought up in the cities council chamber. The question was brought up because Vienna obviously stopped its WieMux migration.
- flomo 15y agoMy understanding is that Munich had a lot of issues which were orthogonal to Linux - decentralized support, lack of inventory, lack of standards. Of course, it didn't help that the original proponents were of an 'ideological' bent and perhaps bit off more than they could chew. Either way, a 9 year IT project is really dismal.
- Xylakant 15y ago
- pingswept 15y agoThe subheading of the linked article, "Monthly IT complaints dropped from 70 to a maximum of 4" is contradicted in the article text. The text of the article says that the "maximum number of complaints" per month dropped from 70 to 46, not 4. (Also, the maximum number of complaints is irrelevant, but I guess complaining here about people not understanding statistics is pointless.)
- click170 15y agoLooks like a very-likely spelling mistake, someone probably just forgot to type the 6.
- keithpeter 15y agoDisclaimer: I'm not a programmer and have been a bystander in medium sized IT projects. Does anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years? If so, will that make it easier to switch the client device without major change in the central plumbing?
- eru 15y agoMy employer thinks that lots of people will switch to using remote `cloud-based' applications. Including web-browser based, but also using custom-clients. But then, they are in the business of selling those remote app software.
- bdunbar 15y agoDoes anyone think that large organisations will tend to move to Web-browser based business applications over the next few years? Yes. We're upgrading (slowly but certainly) JDE and it gets rid of all the fat / skinny clients in favor of Web. Which has been the trend in ERP for a few years now. I don't know if it's a good idea or not - people (coughmanagement*) seem to underestimate the amount of resources ops needs to maintain large farms of web servers in the enterprise. On the other hand, for a few years I was responsible for a bar-code server, which had it's own client to install and that was a white-line nightmare, let me tell you. I don't miss it at all.
- alan_cx 15y agoAn accountants firm I was working for 7 years ago was moving that way. It started when they had to upgrade their time and fees software to being browser based. It was far from perfect, but it logically made so much sense. Once they thought about it, it seemed the logical way to go for everything, so they set it as a long term goal. Dunno how far they got, I packed in working at that time. (nothing to do with any of that)
- hahainternet 15y agoEven in small organisations, at least two projects I have now been involved with have been migrating legacy desktop applications to rich HTML/XUL websites. It's definitely where the smart money is in terms of accessibility.
- skrebbel 15y agoWith these kinds of `hooray linux´ articles, I always wonder whether they included the cost of reduced productivity they included when moving everybody from MS Office to LibreOffice and stuff like that. The difference in quality, stability and features is pretty big. I've worked with LibreOffice only for about 8 months, and I can tell you, it's not just a matter of "getting used to". There's simply a whole bunch of bugs (layout screwing up in Writer, Ctrl+Z not perfectly going back to the previous state, etc) and limitations. The time wasted fighting these tools costs a lot as well. Take 12000 civil servants losing one hour a week on fighting the tools, and you get to 11.7 million pretty fast.
- jimktrains2 15y agoI get layout screw-ups between versions of word, especially mac->win and vice versa.
- doktrin 15y agoI agree. The FOSS office tools are simply not in the same class as Microsoft Office. Anyone who has worked extensively with Excel will acknowledge there really is no true competitor out there. Frankly, I would go so far as to say that a Linux desktop OS is really only appropriate for enthusiasts or those with minimal needs (e.g. email). For just about anyone else, there is simply too much potential hassle involved in getting the basics to work (external displays, anyone?).
- viandante 15y agoFrankly, I would say just the opposite. If your needs are minimal, go with windows. If you need more, linux is a good choice. You will never get a decent terminal in windows or good support for some programming languages (such as python). You are right with Excel although. However, much of the "power" of Excel is really just needed because people are overusing it. Stop making "databases" out of Excel sheets and implement good data analytics system on the server and you'll see that libreoffice is more than enough.
- deleted 15y ago
- FreshCode 15y agoIt would be interesting to measure the number of complaints that were based on experimentation due to users' familiarity with Windows. Since the LiMux environment is probably more restrictive, is it possible some folks just gave up on some features, e.g. "How do I attach my Excel doc to an email?" because there is no Excel, for example. It's great that they are saving the tax-payer , though.
- rodolphoarruda 15y ago"[...] €2.08 million (£1.73 million) for optimisation and test management that ended up on the balance of the LiMux project [...]" Does anyone know details of this? Any ideas on what type of "optimisation" was done?
- ccozan 15y agoLived in Munich for a good while so I know some of it. Most of the optimization and test went on working with documents. They had a lot of excel/doc stuff which was programmed in VB so they had to migrate, reproduce and test them in OpenOffice ( well, now LibreOffice ). Rest went in intregration and desktop. I recommend reading this: http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-independence-limux-project-munich http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-inde...
- tbsdy 15y agoI love Linux myself, and I have no doubt that they've saved money, but the following makes me a little concerned about how they are going about Service Management: "Ude said it was impossible to be exact about the amount of complaints the help desk gets about LiMux, noting that most problems are a combination of several causes. The software is not always the problem, since often there are problems reaching a server, or Internet connections might be malfunctioning." My concern here is that they aren't logging incidents via some sort of appropriate iTSM framework (MOF, ITILv3, etc.) Even the most basic Incident Management setups would allow them to perform basic analysis of the incident data to work out where there issues are coming from. I'm afraid I just don't buy the argument that it's impossible to know for certain where the city's problems are coming from :(
- Xylakant 15y agoI'm speculating a little here, but there might be legal restrictions keeping them from reaching that goal. The basic argument is that any tool that may be used to track work performance (such as a tool tracking user errors) may be abused to control the employees work and thus may need union approval. I've run into this issue multiple times when doing work for government or government-like institutions in germany, once in pretty much the same constellation: A tool for defect tracking in IT was shot down because the union was afraid that it might be used to single out low-performing employees by tracking their computer problems. (sounds silly, I agree, but we're talking germany and we do have our own standards of sillyness.)
- bdunbar 15y ago"... and reduced user complaints" When I hear that metric I think of a homegrown app that was supposed to upload files from PeeCees to the company's mainframe. At the annual IT meeting ... "And since implementing change foo and bar in the system user complaints to the special helpdesk have declined 90% .." My boss stood up [1] "That's because the users got tired of calling and not having anything fixed. It's still broken." The manager/presenter shot daggers at Eric [1]. Cross-hall verbal sniping started. Entertaining. [1] He was retiring in a few months.
- Argorak 15y agoI had some colleagues use the alpha of a new shiny thing the company was building. But none of them ever reported bugs to the bug tracker, because it was "too complicated and nothing ever happened". So the company had someone flying down to our offices and do a presentation on how the (homegrown) bug tracker works. It was a simple, 18-step process just to file a bug... turned out, it was even worse for developers handling those bugs. Yet, people pointing that out where looked at like the were from mars :/.
- wccrawford 15y agoYour boss had a good point. At some point, users become savvy to the whole thing and stop complaining and start trying to fix it on their own. It starts with 'Bobby in accounting told me to X when Y happens' and snowballs from there. It's horrible on productivity and when IT finally does try to fix it, it's often much, much worse. (Though, when the user gets it right, IT doesn't have to fix it after all.) It's also horrible on morale.
- fleitz 15y agoThey moved from Windows NT to Linux in 2006. No wonder it reduced complaints. I'd be far more interested in a migration from Win 7 or Win XP to Linux.
- ccozan 15y agoI think the main reason was independence from vendors - since they were based on NT and Microsoft just pulled the support - ouch!, not necessarily nicety or features of a desktop. The whole infrastructure was changed and not just some frontend.
- rhizome 15y agoI can't find a reference right now, but in 2003-2006 there was a huge jump in license costs for Microsoft customers.
- eropple 15y agoMicrosoft didn't "just pull support" from NT. The lifecycle was pretty well defined.
- Xylakant 15y ago"Pulled support" may be a bit hyperbolic, still, microsofts announcement to EOL Windows NT was a major point in the decision making. There's an interesting detailed document here http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-independence-limux-project-munich http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/software/studies/declaration-inde... that talks about this and other aspects of the Limux project. > Until 2003, the city was using Microsoft Windows NT 4 across the board, and was by and large satisfied. When Microsoft decided to end the support for this operating system, this meant that hardware and important procedures would eventually stop working. “It was from this experience of being totally at the mercy of an external party that we wanted to take the road to more independence”, Schießl (ed. the deputy project manager) says. So having seen the effect of a vendor lock-in, the conscious decision was made to move to an environment where vendor lock-in can be avoided. It may take considerable effort to support a linux distribution after its official EOL but it certainly can be done - unlike any other closed-source OS.
- cs702 15y agoDoubtlessly, this successful migration to desktop Linux must have been very difficult, costly, and disruptive. The upfront costs of migration surely exceed what it would have cost the city to stay on Windows for one or two more waves of upgrades. The important question is: were these upfront costs & multi-year effort worth it? The data presented in the article provides compelling evidence that the answer is yes -- i.e., the migration's recurring savings exceed its upfront costs: * The city no longer has to pay for license upgrades, thereby eliminating a major recurring cost forever -- savings of nearly 3 million pounds every three to four years, according to the article. That's huge. * The city no longer has to upgrade desktop software or hardware as frequently, reducing another recurring cost forever -- also huge. * Most surprisingly, the city claims its IT department is fielding considerably fewer user complaints with Linux than with Windows, reducing another major cost forever. Labor-intensive IT support is always the costliest component of operating a corporate desktop, so that's also huge. If the recurring cost savings claimed by the city of Munich are accurate, every budget-strapped city in the planet should be seriously considering this kind of migration to desktop Linux. It makes a lot of sense purely from a financial standpoint. [UPDATE: I toned down the language and corrected key figures, which were off by an order of magnitude due to an incorrect reading of the article. I also materially changed the bullet point regarding support costs, as the article itself was slightly misleading on the matter. THANK YOU Xylakant and luser001 for pointing out my errors!]
- edwinnathaniel 15y agoIt's good for them that they haven't caught the "SharePoint" (and soon, InfoPath) wave yet cause if they do, the migration cost will rise quite significantly. Most offices these days do use SharePoint heavily and some of the BAs started their hands on InfoPath to make forms for data entry to SharePoint. To make matter worse (or sweeter, depending your POV), these whole thing can be acquired cheaper by using Office 365 (their cloud version of Office) plus certain Office 365 offerings automatically gives you Office 2010 Professional Plus for free. Sweet deal if you ask me. Some of us would like to see Linux to win the battle especially when it comes to cost perspective. Unfortunately, Microsoft took notes and they had adjusted their licensing cost as well. For example: in the K-12 sector, I heard schools are getting 90% discounts. Ninety percent discounts.....
- desireco42 15y agoReplacing MS Office with Libre Office, especially based on comments so far seem to be not that great choice. People not calling support, it might be tu number of reasons. I bet if they did survey on what people think about impact on their work, they would get different results. I was thinking and Google Docs would probably be better choice as alternative to MS, however, this is just another provider ie. you don't get open source. I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot of negativity pushed under the rug here.
- desireco42 15y agoReplacing MS Office with Libre Office, especially based on comments so far seem to be not that great choice. People not calling support, it might be tu number of reasons. I bet if they did survey on what people think about impact on their work, they would get different results. I was thinking and Google Docs would probably be better choice as alternative to MS, however, this is just another provider ie. you don't get open source. I am all for open source, and cities like Munich getting into it is welcome news, and will influence improvement in apps, however I suspect there is a lot of negativity pushed under the rug here.
- kishorgurtu 15y agoLinux? Seriously. A PDP-11 with ed is more than enough. Linux is overkill.
- darklajid 15y agoMaybe interesting as well: Dave Richards is aggregated on planet.gnome.org with his work blog [1] about running the infrastructure of the city of Largo, Florida [2] (granted, far from the size of Munich). Time frame seems similar (since 2006) and his blog contains quite a bit of technical information about the challenges of running a city wide thin client network and the custom software they create for their users. Its a fun read to learn about how many instances of Firefox you can run on a single machine at any given time as well.. 1: http://davelargo.blogspot.com/ http://davelargo.blogspot.com/ 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largo,_Florida
- gitarr 15y agoIt seems to me that some Microsoft (and maybe Apple) marketing people are hard at work at every discussion about this topic, even here.
- tzs 15y agoHave they actually saved anything when you take into account nearly a decade (so far) spent on doing this migration? The Munich migration is pretty much the canonical example of how to botch a Linux migration.
- jwildeboer 15y agoYes. And 6 years (2006 the migration started) is far from "nearly a decade" if I can trust my math. The Munich migration has been attacked, downplayed, doomed for as long as it is running. The article here gives some hard data based on a reply to a request from the opposing political party in Munich that hoped to get some ammo to attack the migration. Instead they got well researched data that shows the opposite - so far they are absolutely in budget, saved 30-60% of costs (as planned), reduced support costs (as hoped) and created a side project called WollMux that tremendously helps in migrating the VB cruft and macro ridden templates that accumulated over the past 10-15 years into a reusable library of centralized functions. They "deduplicated" a lot of redundant forms (one little example: The act of asking for PTO was implemented in 45(!) different forms depending where you work in Munich - now it is one single unified service for all) and by centralising stuff they can now do useful statistics that simply didn't exist before. The focus on Open Standards starts saving a lot of time and money in the archives already. (Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, have been involved privately in the migration a bit since 2005)
- Xylakant 15y agoThe original document has the hard facts: Until 2011 they spent 11.7 Mio Euros on the migration and another 2.08 Mio Euros on workflow optimizations that they tackled at the same time. The calculated cost for a migration of the Windows NT environment to a newer windows version including support and the same workflow optimizations are at 15.52 Mio euros. That's a saving of 1.74 Mio Euros or roughly 11.2%. This is taking into account that most migration costs now have been paid, and savings will subsequently will rise. They also have anecdotical evidence that error rates and ongoing support costs have dropped. It's certainly anything but a canonical example for a botched project.
- DrStalker 15y ago
- azth 15y agoThey should have called it Munix :P