[TriLUG] Outline for proposed Linux for Business presentation.

[Jon Carnes]

On Sunday 13 January 2002 22:39, you wrote:
>
> Ont the length, I'm agree in principal but I'm not entirely sure we can
> cover a great deal in 2 hours.  Perhaps we should consider 2 separate
> sessions instead of one.  Divide it up into IT-infrastructure and
> Applications Development and Productivity.

Hmmm, I had not thought of doing a speil on Applications Development.... I 
can see why that might be attractive as well.

My focus has been infrastructure.  The savings for using Linux on the 
back-end of a corporation are easy to see.  I think our focus would need to 
depend on the audience... We might find them more receptive on the clearly 
tanagable savings that come with using Linux in the Infrastructure:  
Firewalls, Mailservers, FTP hosts, Webservers, Fileservers, Printservers, 
Routers, and Network monitoring. 

>
> I like the idea of a catered sit down.  Again, however, it points the
> need for a sponsored approach as I can't imagine the LUG could/should
> pay for that out of the geek pizza money :-).

Yes.  We would definately need a sponsor.  Perhaps a local University might 
be interested in this kind of mini-seminar.

> I think we should definitely focus on integration in an existing windows
> network and case it that "okay if you replace your PDC and central
> servers you save X"..

Fortunately all of the above services work well and integrate into an 
Environment using a Microsoft PDC.  It doesn't have to be replaced - though 
once a business has the expertise to run Linux in-house, they will 
certainly want to drop the MS version and run the Samba version.  The 
savings are considerable!

>
> Any thoughts on implementation?  Marketing is really something I'm
> learning about currently.  I've got the "Marketing For Dummies" book and
> everything.  For the "productivity" part of the talk we should endeavor
> to find a good accounting type package to demo as well.

Well this depends on our audience.  I don't envision an audience that is 
looking to move 100% over to Linux, so we really don't have to replace all 
productivity tools with Linux alternatives.  It should be enough that the 
applications can be hosted easily on Linux servers and the apps will still 
work fine on their Windows Workstations.
>
> Do we also want to do comparisons of Linux to Solaris?

No.  Solaris' niche is that of a higher end server.  Also, true Solaris 
folks are only slightly less fanatical than Mac users.

Jon