I have always wondered if it would be possible to use Open source software in an office that heavily uses MS products and not be detected. The experiment: To replace as much of my personal desktop applications that I use on day to day basis with those that are Open Source and/or shareware.

Currently I am on assignment with a company that has a large customer base and a busy call and support center. I am doing their development, reporting and some of their IT support. From the start I had implemented Firefox, svn, and WAMP to support SVN. I had used these products and their budget was such that it wouldn’t support alot more than the bare essentials. My day to day existence was normal, but it was all contained to me and my personal development. There wasn’t any outside interaction. Fastward to last week.

In a slow day before Thanksgiving, my mind wandered back to my experiment. Could I function with opensource/shareware products and how many such products before it became noticeable. Last week I took the initiative, I installed Mozilla’s Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and gVim. I carefully configured Thunderbird to mimic outgoing mail as closely as I could to Outlook. There were some difference’s, but only one person commented on it. This week I am going to install and configure Bugzilla to track changes and requests and produce reports for management.

Things have gone well. Spreadsheets, reports, documents, Email are all going according to plan. The only complaint I have is I miss the folder view in Outlook 2002, but then this office is still on Office 2000 so it is not missed by the definition of the experiment.

Firefox RC2 is out. Its speed improvements are great and so far it works well. But like with any RC there can be issues and like other Firefox releases this one doesn’t support all of the extensions and themes yet. So if there is an extension or theme that you just can not live without, back up your profiles using FEBE. It does a nice job of backing up all of the essentials. This way if you get into a place that you can’t continue using RC2 you can uninstall it and roll back to your original profiles.

Technorati Tags: Firefox RC2, Firefox, Backup, Profiles, FEBE