Convincing a school district to migrate from OS X to Ubuntu or Edubuntu

[Paige Thompson]

David,

I totally disagree with Clifford, that's just exactly the kind of mentality
that has held Ubuntu back. Never be the last to stand up and say, its time
for change. This morning I forwarded this thread to my boss, and he's ready
to try Ubuntu on a computer here. So far in my efforts to migrate the school
away from software that *they can't afford, *have been successful and
*all*of what we have here today is comparable.

Here's a road map for us,

x. Google Apps - already migrated from exchange
1. Get more people using Thunderbird, The Lightening plugin, and the contact
sync plugin.Already people are using the web based stuff whether they like
it or not.
x. Firefox - We already use Firefox all over the campus and while it would
be nice to have Administrative templates, it's more common practice to
control content  and internet usage using a content filter / transparent
proxy.

2. Open Office - Should be easy considering most of the folks around here
really don't like Office 2007.

3. Web Based Accelerated Reader - We already have web-based mathematics
stuff.

Wish list, but really unnecessary in retrospect:

- Google Apps support for hashed passwords if its not there already
- An easy way to deploy Ubuntu with support for authenticating against an
LDAP server, preferably a Ubuntu Server
- A backup service that will authenticate google apps either out of LDAP or
using special administrative privaledges to pull messages for all of the
email accounts through IMAP as well as IMAP folders "labels".





On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:41 PM, CLIFFORD ILKAY <clifford_ilkay at dinamis.com
> wrote:

> David McNally wrote:
> > Hello everybody.
> >
> > This question will probably take a little while to type, but I'll try to
> > get it through.
> >
> > First off, I should probably point out that I live here in the United
> > States, in northern New Jersey. The kind of people who live around me
> > are rich idiots; they're the kind of people who, somehow, have a lot of
> > money, but still use Windows. No one here knows anything about Linux,
> > let alone Ubuntu.
> [snip]
> > Would we be able to do this at all? Also: is Edubuntu really that much
> > better for schools than Ubuntu?
> >
> > Please let me know what you think.
>
> Hello David,
>
> The place to start is with yourself. Calling people who use Windows
> "rich idiots" is not the way to win them over. Most people don't give a
> whit about computers and just muddle their way through them to get a
> limited number of things done inefficiently. That doesn't make them
> idiots. Treat the people whom you're trying to win over with genuine
> respect, acknowledge their strengths, and learn as much as you can about
> what they do. From that, you will figure out how to help them and they
> will be more inclined to take you seriously. If after you understand
> their particular circumstances the logical conclusion is that Windows or
> OS X might in fact serve their needs better, be honest and tell them so.
> Linux is NOT the right choice for everyone, yet, though in K-12
> education, it is an excellent choice.
> --
> Regards,
>
> Clifford Ilkay
> Dinamis
> 1419-3266 Yonge St.
> Toronto, ON
> Canada  M4N 3P6
>
> <http://dinamis.com>
> +1 416-410-3326
>
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