TooMuchGreen

In every aspect of life there’s an ideally suited tool for the job. Around the house we have a whole range of cooking, gardening and D.I.Y bits and bobs, in sport we use specific types of fitness equipment and attire for our chosen exercise, an artist uses a certain type of brush for a certain type of paint and a photographer has a selection of lenses for different types of shoot. It’s exactly the same in the world of computing.

Apple produce beautifully designed machines running an eloquently superior operating system inherently suited to media, arts and the home, their business platform is correspondingly swish in it’s intuitive ease of use however Microsoft hold a throttling 90%+ market share of the enterprise desktop, why so?

People just associate Microsoft with business software, it has a legacy of suitability and has more than evolved into it’s niche. Their Active Directory is unmatched as an enterprise network operating system and the offices of the world communicate to each other via a back end MS Exchange email solution, Apple obviously realise this. Rather than trying to create a matching solution Apple merely facilitate symbiotic MS Exchange connectivity from their own mail systems, in fact thanks to Exchange integration the iPhone is well on it’s way to completely taking over the hand-held world of pocket business communication, why even try to develop a rival when you can become equally as prominent by riding the success of some else’s existing product.

And Linux? Linux is the engine of the computer world.

The majority of web servers run Linux, as do the majority of in-house application delivery and development servers, there is nothing as stable, as reliable or as cost effective as a server running Linux, it is most definitely the right tool for the job,

Moving forward from the the back end away from Linux application servers, MS Exchange and the Active Directory we end up at the enterprise desktop. There’s no doubt Microsoft Vista was a lemon, they most definitely shot themselves in the foot there and it’s bloated unsuitability will probably go down in history as Microsoft’s worst ever operating system (aside from Windows ME of course). MacOSX is a superb platform but due to it’s requirement for pure Apple hardware just isn’t an option for a sizeable mainstream business looking for a cost effective I.T strategy (although any design, photography, music or general media company worth it’s salt obviously operate from a Mac base), and Linux? Who runs a Linux desktop? Well, not too many people yet, but they will do, Ubuntu is coming.

At $200 a pop (average) for a single licensed Microsoft unit running their corresponding Office suite the figures can most certainly start to add up. Ubuntu Linux is free. Ubuntu brings the inherent stability of Linux to the desktop and unlike it’s virus prone alternative an Ubuntu client isn’t going to go down with the latest computer equivalent of swine flu. Thanks to products such as Likewise Open Ubuntu will also seamlessly authenticate to the MS Active Directory and pull mail down from MS Exchange, contrary to popular belief it actually get’s on quite well with Microsoft’s back end business systems, and vice versa.

Any successful decision in the world of computing begins with having the insight to select the most suitable system for the intended end use, which is actually not as convoluted as many would imagine. The following breakdown covers all aspects of computing with a simple three option ideal suitability list..

• Apple – Home use & laptops. Media (home & business) – video, music, design, arts, photography, handhelds (iPods & iPhones).

• Microsoft – Back-end business services – Active Directory network management and MS Exchange email systems.

• Linux – Web & application servers, Ubuntu business enterprise desktop clients.

With our tailored Ubuntu client build Too Much Green are the tool for the job when it comes to providing Linux based enterprise desktop solutions, this isn’t sales pitch (well, not much) we just know our place. We’re not here to try and take over the world of computing, just to point it in the right direction and help it on it’s way.