enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[David Partain <david.partain@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings all,

As one of the people pushing for this discussion at both of the last two 
UDSs, I thought it might be a good idea to offer my reasons for having a 
discussion.

I work for a very large company.  That company, like most large 
companies (and many smaller ones) has invested very heavily in Microsoft 
infrastructure of various flavors (Exchange, Active Directory, 
Sharepoint, Windows on the desktop, and so on).  Whether I like that or 
not is in fact entirely irrelevant to the task at hand.  That task is to 
make using Ubuntu in that environment as easy and pleasant as possible 
for users who choose to use Ubuntu.  While many things "just work", 
there are plenty of areas where it's not as easy as it should be.

Of course, one could say that this is "giving in", and there's a part of 
me that certainly agrees with that.  However, when working for change 
inside any organization, whether large or not, telling people they're 
wrong and that we have to do everything differently certainly doesn't 
work.  My strategy is instead to make the client an attractive 
alternative to using something else.  If we can do that by fixing things 
that just don't work or are painful, we've done a very Good Thing.

I think there are multiple threads that might be useful to discuss:

- What pain points are there to using an Ubuntu client inside a 
Microsoft-dominated corporate environment?
- What is painful in an environment that _isn't_ Microsoft-dominated?
- What solutions to these issues have people come up with and can we get 
them documented?
- What alternatives are there for various bits of IT infrastructure 
(calendaring, mail, document management, collaboration tools, storage, 
etc.)?
- etc.

The word "boring" has been used to describe what we want to accomplish. 
 I personally don't find it a bit boring.  Making Ubuntu a viable 
alternative inside the largest companies in the world is anything but 
boring, and I firmly believe that without making Ubuntu play nicely in 
environments that aren't particularly friendly is absolutely critical 
for that to happen.  Just my opinion, though :-)

Cheers,

David