Middle/High school Charter School

pmcginnis

Middle/High school Charter School

Hello, I am Director of Technology at a Charter middle / high school. It has come time for us to renew our microsoft licensing agreement and the idea of going opensource and using edubuntu was brought up.

I am very familiar with active directory and group policy editor in a windows domain, but how does that all work in a linux domain? Will I have as much control and how easily/quickly could I get this going?

mfillpot

You touched on a weakness by asking about the group policy editor, that is one component of windows that is hard to replace in its entirety. First understand that with Linux and opensource based solutions the administration is more than point-and-click, so more experienced administrators will be needed.

We had a previous question about comparative services on https://www.linux.com/community/forums/system-management/active-directory-alternative/limit/20/offset/0 , I highly recommend for you to read that discussion to see various options.

Now as for replacing the entire domain, as an educational institution that change would require giving up your windows based software and potentially ms office. Due to that I would recommend looking at the potential of replacing the network servers and student facing machines with Linux and open source implementations and consider keeping the administration on windows, this is also recommended because many of the administrative users are set in their ways when in comparison the students are faster learners of technology and can easily adapt to the change in software.

Please post specific follow-up questions for specific software or service based questions.

RSims

I would recommend keeping your windows server with active directory only, then using Linux for the clients and any other server you end up needing. This would probably be the easiest way to save money, install linux, and easily meet all your needs without much change.

RSims

Can always install LibreOffice before hand but it's true it would be different and frustrate some people. Hmm, I agree.