[sf-lug] Request for bid

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi,

My employer, Al Stoll, is sick and tired of Microsoft Windows problems, and
he is willing to consider a move to GNU-Linux.  He has asked me to find a
company that could do the initial move, and could provide on-going support.
 We would like to speak with companies that could bid to do this work.  We
do have some mission-critical apps that must run on Microsoft Windows, or so
we think.  Number one among them is Filemaker Pro.  Al is willing to
consider OpenOffice.org, but we would need to be assured that OOo would be
able to be a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Office.

I, of course, am a Linux zealot, but we need to make sure that this
transition is seamless, or it won't happen at all.  Al Stoll visited the
Creative Arts Charter School, and was very impressed with seeing the kids
there doing video editing on Linux.  Al sort of gets the importance of Free
as in Free Speech, but he and the rest of the staff are very much end users,
and we would need to make sure that we don't put them through a huge
learning curve.  They need to be able to leave on Friday and come back to
work on Monday, and get maybe half a day of training and then they need to
be able to be off to the races again, as our office is a high-pressure
office with very serious personal injury cases (brain damage cases, etc).
 Our opponents usually assign twice the number of lawyers that we have to
cases on which they oppose us, and so downtime kills us.  In fact, one of
the reasons that Al is considering moving is that he is unhappy with the
downtime that we have been experiencing due to Microsoft's failware.  If
this migration is made at all, it will need to be made on the basis of
stability, reliability, high up-time, and competitive cost.  We would need a
firm that has experience in working with newbies and assessing their needs
and making the technology transparent to them.
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