I attended an Ubuntu evening this week at the Met Hotel in Leeds. Organised by the West Yorkshire fraction of BCS the seminar was hosted by Ubuntu’s Matthew Barker and was a promotional awareness event held to present an overview of the company, product and current/future direction.

Matthew’s presentation was incredibly positive and I was most warmed by the parallels with TooMuchGreen‘s corresponding ideals, it was also nice to see a couple of fun new acronyms pop up – JEDI & UFO. As we all know the I.T world loves its acronyms however these two are particularly choice. JEDI stands for Just Enough Desktop Infrastructure and UFO is the complimentary solution – Ubuntu + Firefox + Open Office (OK yes, that’s UFOO, but you get the idea).

Sci-fi geek-ness aside, and as highlighted during the evening, it’s actually worth noting that across the world of business 40% of all users can quite happily carry out 100% of their work with a base UFO build, here at TooMuchGreen we take things one step further and although our acronym may not be as cool the EU Build is.

The EU Build (Enterprise Ubuntu) from TooMuchGreen not only provides JEDI through a base UFO but takes things a stage further to double client potential for application provision by adding MS Active Directory integration via Likewise Open and full Citrix XenApp connectivity. Doubling up on freely available open source options mean costs relating to licenced products are inversely halved and from a base level up for totally new adoptions this provides an even more lucrative reduction in TCO by offering a full 80% drop in expenditure.

How much does your company spend on software licencing at £200 (average) per machine for an operating system and office package? And how much is it going to cost you to upgrade to Windows 7 for users who only need a web browser, a word processor and an eMail client?

MEBBI™ Solutions provide open source consultancy, migration services, and support packages. Maybe you should get the calculator out and give them a call.

There’s no doubting the ubiquitous predominance of Microsoft® Active Directory™ (AD) across business enterprise networks of the world (well done Microsoft), however in the emerging new age of browser based cloud application delivery an Ubuntu Linux desktop client is a distinct no brainer, why pay good money for software licensing and expensive high end hardware to (basically) just run Firefox?

As an innovative and forward thinking Network Manager you’re impressed by the TCO savings and increased stability an Ubuntu enterprise platform will bring, you’d like to look into adopting an open source strategy but you’re confused about implemented integration with your existing AD infrastructure. You’ve heard cross-client AD authentication is possible but aren’t sure how much work it will involve and have no burning desire to drop your poor technicians into the depths of  command line confusion for Windbind, SAMBA and OpenLDAP, well the good news is that you don’t have to, Identity Management Solutions from Likewise will save you (and them) from a world of pain. Likewise are sector leaders for facilitated extension of Microsoft networks and provide truly secure Kerberos staged integration with your AD environment for Linux®, UNIX® and Mac through a three tiered application suite.

Base user credential authentication comes via Likewise Open which is FREE to download and presently supports over 125 different platforms, it’s sociably available through the Ubuntu apt-get repositories and offers a user friendly domain join GU for those preferring to work with the mouse rather than the CLI.
Moving up the scale to their chargeable mid ground is the UID-GID module offering increased flexibility of administration for UID, GID & OU values via an MMC snap in.
At the top of the tree is the all encompassing Likewise Enterprise providing fully comprehensive administration for centralised ease of deployment and infrastructure management.

Likewise offer a most reasonable range of varying service plans and support contracts starting from basic online self-service How-To’s and leading up to contracted 24/7 live response. Their pricing structure is extremely competitive with a perpetual server licence for their top end Enterprise solution pitching in at only $299, this also includes 1 year product support. Further information, contact details and on-line demos are available on the Likewise website.

Too Much Green are staunch advocates of Likewise. We include and configure base Likewise Open AD connectivity as part of our tailored O-Build service and would be more than happy to discuss Ubuntu & open source migration and integration strategies with you.

Feel free to contact us anytime (details via the Solutions page)