My wife used to work for a small business, just her and her boss.

She had worked for large companies that owned their own IT departments and was used to ICT that worked* (the usual caveat for ICT..)

Working in a small business was an eye opener for her, she went from having a telephone support to having none.

Luckily for her and him and unluckily for me, at the time she joined the company I was injured and at home recovering from surgery. I was able to help with both purchasing and setting up of clustered servers to host a CRM and other related business software.

The company got free ICT support because it helped my wife; it also kept me from being bored.

Due to him being an intractable Yorkshire man (I can say that because I too am one..) her boss ran all his laptops/PC’s on Windows OS’s while everything I had access to, servers, laptops and PC’s that my wife worked on all ran variations of Linux – Ubuntu..

The time required to support Linux was vastly less than that of Windows, just the odd apt-get upgrade and hey presto.. I also insisted that all email transactions were done via a browser rather than a thick client, again needing less support and reducing exposure to any virus.

When my wife eventually left to set up her own business (http://hesslepetservices.co.uk) I carried on with the free support to her ex boss as it didn’t take up too much of time and I enjoyed helping out.

Continue reading Moving from Microsoft to Linux – a small business view →