Sanghi Industries : Migration on Linux Platform

The slowdown had shown the path of open source and free software to quite a

few organizations, and similarly this project was also conceptualized to reduce

the cost of IT and strengthen security.

The five member IT team of Sanghi Industries Limited headed by Mukud Gandhi

was assigned to migrate the majority of the existing network to open source and

Linux. The benefits visualized before commencing this project were saving the

windows OS license cost, plus saving on the client level anti virus cost as

Linux being is a secure OS doesn't always requires a client level anti virus in

place.

The biggest challenges faced while commencing this project was the

un-acceptance to change from Windows to Linux by the users of the organization

due to obvious familiarity issues.

The other technical challenges were to run IPMSG.exe which is a Windows based

organization wide small messaging solution and some other regular Windows

applications.

To make these apps work, extensive use of wine (which is a Windows emulator

for Linux) was done. The other problem faced by the organization was to migrate

old pst file of Outlook to Linux. After testing quite a few Linux mail clients

they finally used Thunderbird mail client for importing the .pst file to Linux.