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In all seriousness: Microsoft Office and Outlook (not Express). Also, why buy/use another web server that is not point and click friendly when Microsoft provides one for "free"? [Devil's advocate] I understand and share your concerns; however, our company are under a strict corporate mandate to run Microsoft Products (TM). Virtually all of the IT staff is trained on Microsoft. You do not get the strong interoperability between products that admins and users are used to unless you are running Microsoft Products. Introducing *NIX into the equation brings learning curves, growing pains, and redesign of key infrastructure that our corporate management is not willing to undertake. The only *NIX (I think) systems we have run our DNS core and firewalling, and those support personnel are outsourced, not in-house. We do not get official corporate IT support for the AS/400s (a rare breed in our corporation). I am a programmer, not a system administrator. However, we (myself and two others) have enough resources and experience to be our own system administrators. In the next few years we will be fighting to keep our AS/400 to run JDE. (Corporate already has an enterprise license for running JDE on NT.) The predominant reasons I run Windows at work are 1) corporate mandate, 2) Microsoft Office & Outlook, and 3) IBM Client Access. If I am to be fully productive at work, I must have Office equivalents with full functionality. Star Office does a decent job. However, we need better Powerpoint, Access, and Project interoperability on other platforms. Somebody please show me an equivalent to Outlook that provides Outlook's functionality (email, shared calendaring, shared task lists, collaboration features). IBM should take the initiative and develop a full-featured Client Access suite (emulator, fully-featured file upload/download, printer emulation, and Ops Nav) for *NIX, Mac, etc. Only when these things are accomplished can I even start thinking about suggesting a move from Windows. My concerns here are the other concerns raised whenever I mention Linux, etc. (Not to mention Autocad, Catia, Mainsaver, Citrix, and numerous other packages we use on a daily basis.) Corporate management must change if we are to reduce the costs of these viral/worm attacks, and get better control of our TCO and licensing issues WRT Microsoft Products. However, until someone in the position sees the light of other (non-MS) solutions and is agreeable to their implementation, the current situation will not change. Loyd -----Original Message----- From: Dennis Lovelady [mailto:dlovelady@dtcc.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2001 8:40 AM To: midrange-l@midrange.com Subject: Re: Gartner Group: DO NOT USE IIS! Hi, all: Quoting Gartner To protect against Nimda, Microsoft recommends installing numerous patches and service packs on virtually every PC and server running IE, IIS Web servers or the Outlook Express e-mail client. As the earlier Code Red worm showed, many servers and PCs running IIS Web server processes may not be obvious since they may be run as personal Web servers on the intranet but still be exposed to the Internet. End quote Ummm... I have a slightly different suggestion. For those applications where AS/400 may not be a good fit, or may just be too expensive to implement there.... Why patch MS to make it kinda-sorta reliable for the next few minutes? Why use MS at all? Why does our user community and those who make the decisions even CONSIDER putting up with the expense and problems of trouble-prone MS products? All of this stuff and much more is available for Linux and other flavors of Unix, and at prices that should scare the dickens out of Macro$loth (frequently $0.00; invariably less than MS). Also, have those decision-making people not been watching the salary costs of MS "CEs" vs. a good System Administrator on ANY other platform? Number of unix systems impacted by IIS threats: 0. Number of unix systems impacted by the Code Red virus: 0 Dennis Lovelady Accenture
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