enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[ballock <boleslaw.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, Paweł,

> One remark from my side before we go on with discussion: from so far
> experience, I would advise to stick with solutions that are
> recommended / supported by Canonical. We can of course evaluate on
> different ideas and solutions, but I believe you would agree that our
> goal should be to come up with stable, reliable and well supported
> solution. It would not be a good idea to develop something that will
> not be backed up and supported by the producer of the operating system :)
I understand, this is a valid point. However, I would not like to be
limited by the "main" software archive and things that Canonical can
support. This is the Enterprise "Community" anyway.

AFAIK you have Canonical support for your systems, good for you - but
actually you do not need the Community to help you out in just the
"Canonical-supported" things.

I hope the Canonical guys in this group would correct me if I am wrong,
but I think that it is not that plain to say what is "supported" and
what is not. They need to provide "best-effort" support for other stuff
as well.

Another thing is that I do not think the aim is to produce "a" or even
"the" solution. We live in a free world and better than providing a one
solution that suits them all is to provide information about components
that you can interchange.

> As an example I would give the case of using MS Office via Wine
> emulation. Yes, it is possible (much is possible in Linux world), but
> as I remember Canonical does not resolve any issues when occurred...
> The more addons we come up with, the more effort will be necessary to
> keep the system running.
The case of using MS Office on our Ubuntu machines was discussed in
Tieto. We discussed the option of using Crossover by buying their
support subscription or by using an unsupported Wine wrapper. Crossover
was too expensive, the nightmare of supporting people with Office
application crashing ourselves was not compelling either.

What I mean to say is that a support contract is one of important
factors for choosing a particular solution. Canonical cannot support any
software on the planet, but if you want support for that software anyway
I guess you can buy support for that software from its vendor.

Your concern gave me some thinking, though. A person bumping into a
section about using Exchange in Ubuntu may think that it works really
well, while in fact it does not. And you will not get official support
from any company. Perhaps we should start each section with some
assessment like:

Works with Ubuntu (versions: xxx): scale 1-5
Supported by: Canonical contract/some other company contract.

Personally I would love to see contract's price tags, but I don't think
this would ever happen on a wiki.

Cheers,
Ballock