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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
Living Outside the Box
Written on February 28, 2009
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At the start of the year, I wiped the hard disk on my laptop to perform a little experiment. I wanted to see if I could be able to do everything that needed to be done without Microsoft applications.
Now, the laptop shipped with Windows Vista Business and I just refreshed its image, so I did keep the core operating system and components. However, I did not load the applications that I normally would from Microsoft. Instead, I used a number of free substitutes to see if I could get by – I use my laptop a lot for teaching, grading work, handling issues with my clients, and so on.
Chrome is an alternative to Internet Explorer. It’s not necessarily a friendly browser but it is lightweight, easy to install, self-updating, and fast – very fast. In running Java applications, in fact, it’s 57-times faster than Internet Explorer.
OpenOffice is a free alternative to Microsoft Office and comes with a spreadsheet application, word processor, visual presentation application, a database, and some other tools. It’s compatable with Office in that it will open and save MsO2003 and MsO2007 documents. It’s also not perfect and had some problems translating Microsoft Office 2007 documents, and sometimes, the visual display didn’t work out like it was expected. It allowed me though to interact with students who used Microsoft Office exclusively though.
OpenOffice doesn’t come with a standard personal information manager (PIM) like Outlook, so I needed an alternative here. Mozilla makes a pretty good product called Thunderbird. This product has the ability to manage calendar, contact, task, and note objects, as well as email – in an interfact that’s very like Outlook. Using Google’s IMAP features, I was able to interact with my Google Gmail and the folders, contacts, and other items that I already had loaded there. As Gmail is a free email solution, I didn’t have to pay for that either. Those using Microsoft Exchange should note here that with IMAP capabilities, Thunderbird can be a mail client with Exchange instead of Outlook… bonus!
Now, Thunderbird is cool, but I didn’t have the calendar synchronization that I wanted to my primary PC. So here’s how I solved it. First, I downloaded this Plug-in for Thunderbird that synchronizes Thunderbird with my Google Calendar. Then, I downloaded an application for my primary office computer that synchronizes Outlook with Google Calendar. So what would happen is, every thirty minutes, my office machine would sync my usual Outlook calendar to Google, which would then be synchronized by Thunderbird. I think the biggest problem here would eventually be synchronization with my Blackberry if I went cold-turkey off Outlook.
Google Apps is a free way to be able to manage files remotely and with shared resources – kind of like OfficeLive, except without the Microsoft slant. Here, I was able to upload my MsOffice and OpenOffice documents and manage them, share them with specific people, and download them at any time. No more thumb drives. Real-time, secure, collaborative access to shared content.
Still paying Adobe $400 for Acrobat to create your *.pdf files? Well stop that – download free CutePDF today to create advertising-free, clean, PDF’s. Now, if you’re creating low-resolution office documents and standard photographs with this *.pdf writer, you’ll be fine; if you want more capabilities and embedded controls, you’re going to have to pay Adobe. CutePDF though worked great for my needs.
Can’t be without Twitter – my favorite free tool is Spaz.
Antivirus products aren’t integrated into Microsoft Windows (yet) but no computer should be without one these days. FreeAVG is a good, free solution that is integrated with email, browsing, and files, and offers defense against spam and spyware. Again, it’s not perfect, but it’s a step in the right direction.
9. Instant Messaging: Google Talk.
Using Google a lot, a number of my pals are online using Google as well, so I caught up with them using Talk. Some people, though, can’t live without Yahoo! or MSN, and for them, I’d recommend downloading Trillian Basic – a free application that allows you to talk to at least three IM services through just one application (Yahoo!, MSN, and Google Talk).
Finally, I wanted to install a little more protection for my laptop because I tend to use it in public a lot. So I installed the free version of ZoneAlarm to provide me protection above the normal firewall offered by Windows.
What I found from this experiment is that I could do almost everything I would normally do with some subtle and, alas, sometimes annoying changes. The system was fast – a lot faster than I remember with just IE 7.0, MsO2007, and Symantec’s Norton Internet Security loaded on the previous image. However, some of the annoyances were show stoppers:
One example: contact and calendar information isn’t as easily accessible through Thunderbird as Outlook (or, I’m just conditioned to Outlook so much that I’d have to say that I prefer it over this free competitor). I also couldn’t directly sync my Blackberry with the Thunderbird instance. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t have worked for me unless I installed my kludge (where I bounced information across Google).
Another example: MsWord 2007 documents sometimes opened pretty poorly inside of OpenOffice and I had to play with the formatting manually to get the output right. And sometimes I’d re-save an MsWord doc using OpenOffice (retaining the Word format) and the changes that I made didn’t quite save right. Rather annoying.
Another example: Proprietary stuff from Microsoft, like, no Microsoft Access. I found that I could run MsO2007 Access applications using the free runtime component, I couldn’t edit the Access database. I could run and use Access applications but I couldn’t edit them. Since I develop and publish Access databases, this was a problem.
Last example: one of my schools that I work for doesn’t support non-IE browsers. When I tried to access DeVry/Keller using Chrome, it rejected me. When I accessed Colorado Technical University, no problems there, and the entire experience was superfast and useful. Unfortunately, Outlook Web Access looks pretty crummy in Chrome, too, so that wasn’t an entirely positive experience.
So, at the end of a quarter, I’m debating what to do now. It feels like I have a lot of ties back to Microsoft applications, yet with some additional experimentation, I might be able to sever that to an even greater extent. I’m actually trying to convince myself to wipe the drive again and install Ubuntu (Linux) on the machine instead of Vista, then, load a majority of these applications back in to see if I can survive entirely without Microsoft. I dunno – makes me a little nervous but I’m willing to give it a go. Just to rack up the savings if I used the same strategies that I mentioned above and then got rid of Windows Vista, the total software licensing savings would be somewhere in this ballpark:
Operating System (Vista Business Upgrade) ….. $199
Productivity App (MsOffice 2007 Professional) …. $449
Adobe Acrobat Professional …. $399
Antivirus, Antispam, Firewall …. $79
Now, that’s $1,126 in licensing savings, not to mention all of the value-added benefits from the Google apps, Gmail, and Calendar. In an era of cost cutting, imagine those kinds of costs per user in your small business.
R