InformationWeek

The Good Samaritan Society is a nonprofit organization that provides long-term nursing home care and related services for the elderly. The network includes about 2,500 users, with more than 200 servers covering 240 field offices across 25 states.

Rusty Williams, the society's CIO, says he decided to move to a network PC model, using stripped-down PCs running without hard drives to lower costs and facilitate centralized management of the network across the highly dispersed organization.

Some application and operating-system information is stored in local memory, with the bulk of the processing and storage handled by servers. The organization is using IBM's Network Station Series 1000 client computers. "Anything we do has to be very cost-effective," Williams says.

The Good Samaritan Society moved to Linux as its operating system because the server product it first tried wasn't performing well. "I had people coming to my office just begging me to give Linux a try because maintenance and troubleshooting were overwhelming them," Williams says. "So we changed to Linux, and they haven't been to my office since."

But it's only thanks to the recent availability of mainstream Linux desktop applications that the Good Samaritan Society has been able to use the operating system for its thin-client networking. Williams estimates that his organization is realizing initial savings of $1.8 million over the cost of using the common Windows-based thin-client network architecture offered by Citrix Systems Inc. That figure includes lower costs for license fees and implementation.

To handle the bulk of office desktop duties, the Good Samaritan Society selected ApplixWare Office. Williams says his company chose Applix-Ware over other program suites because of its history of commitment to the Linux platform. ApplixWare has been running native on the operating system for a couple of years, Williams says. He adds that ApplixWare Office provides similar functionality to Microsoft Office "for the most part."

"The user should be able to make the transition fairly comfortably," Williams says. He has conducted tests with some staff to see how quickly they can learn the ApplixWare suite.

He expects some power users to complain about losing use of Microsoft Office. But he says such quibbling is "kind of a moot point" considering the centralized control and cost savings the Linux system provides. Williams plans to roll out the ApplixWare suite to all employees by the end of the year.

Other companies, such as Avienda Technologies Inc., an Atlanta startup that's creating an online messaging system, have committed to using Linux throughout the company. In the case of Avienda, the company is dominated by programmers familiar with Linux who have chosen it for their development platform.

Ted Roberts, chief technology officer at Avienda, says nonprogrammers are also comfortably using Linux and its desktop applications. The employees are using the Abisoft shareware word processing program, which runs on both Linux and Windows.

They also use StarOffice from Sun, which Roberts says is "almost as good" as Microsoft Office. The primary problem with the suite is that it is difficult to share documents with business partners outside the company since everyone else is standardized on Office, and Microsoft doesn't offer much help for reading documents from competing products.

Avienda also uses MySQL shareware as a desktop database, because the one in StarOffice is "too lightweight," Roberts says.

Before deploying any Linux desktop application, Roberts says he uses a few employees as guinea pigs to see how the application functions in his company's work environment. He adds that drag-and-drop functionality is not fully supported on Linux desktops and its applications. Windows also offers a superior built-in user help support.

"You can achieve the same end results with Linux desktop applications, it's just not as cut-and-dried as with Windows," Roberts says, adding that he doesn't blame other IS managers for being hesitant to deploy Linux desktop applications.

"Fear about Linux is partly deserved, since it's been the domain of gun-slinging programmers," he says. "But if you take a methodical approach to bringing Linux desktop applications into the corporation, you should not be afraid."

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