anyway, glad it was a success
]]>be advised that people fear change, if you show them too much, they'll be scared out of it.
plant the seed, but don't wet it too much, else it'll die.
then, it highly depends on the audience.
I think as said by some others it is the finished product or rather the presentation that matters the most to any corporate house. So it is not a matter of extreme importance what software was taken help of when doing the project. Being a company owner myself I would like to stick to the Windows and the associated programs as these are the software which my employees find easy to work with. So why should I go for a new up gradation?
Because you might save a bunch of money on licenses using either completely free software. And if you need support you could go for an "enterprise ready" distribution which will cost you money, but comes with a ton of applications you don't get (for free) with Microsoft. Obviously, it all comes down to what you need application wise and what you have system administrator wise. If your employees can't or won't admin Linux boxes, you better stay with Microsoft. Or get better employees.
]]>- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running Zarafa
- SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 running
* Evolution connected to Zarafa.
* If VMware allows me, I'll also show the 3D desktop eye candy
* OpenOffice with a few "typical" Microsoft documents (don't know which ones yet)
* Wine running a typical Windows application
Sorry guys, but no Arch simply because Red Hat & SuSE are the only distributions supported by major hardware and software vendors (not my choice).
I think showing desktops with "concrete" applications will have a bigger impact on visitors than simply putting a headless server running god knows how many l33t services. Linux sys admins will obviously look right through that, but at least they'll realize we're offering Linux solutions aswell.
]]>The Exchange-alternative I was talking about is Zarafa. It's a very nice solution and is supposed to be a lot cheaper than Exchange.
]]>Here is just one example of a post I found that shows the problem;
http://community.salesforce.com/sforce/ … sage.id=48
What do you think?
]]>Also, customizing what you show your audience to what apps or functionality they use their computers for most will pay big dividends, if you're able to do that. For example, if they really care about MS Word and Excel showing Open Office would be way more useful than demonstrating Xen. Think of it as a sales presentation - concentrate on the stuff the customer cares about. If they don't care about it they won't buy no matter how cool what you're selling is.
]]>Ruby on Rails. Show them how you can prototype a functional CMS in under 5 minutes.
No offense, but how many corps really care about implementation things like this?
Business tends to look at the end result, instead of implementation.
In just about any managerial meeting (except maybe the engineers that are to implement) at a high level in a company, and they talk about what results they want..not really which tools they use to get there.
Showing finished products, is more 'business' oriented then showing them development tools.
If he is targetting a different audience..like web developers..then sure.. show they ruby on rails.
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