Monday, June 9, 2014

Ubuntu Operating System, To Program Or Not To Program

Dear Mr. Pereira,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to analyze the Ubuntu operating system in order to decrease internal programing costs.  This has been a great learning experience for me and I am pleased to announce a thorough analysis has been fully performed.  With this analysis I can say that programing costs will not be cut with this new program.  Unfortunately I must advise against the implementation of this program as it will not be suitable for our day to day tasks.

Ubuntu is an operating system which offers capability of running a virtual computer from your desktops and laptops.  This system can provide programs, free of charge, which in other cases would cost a substantial amount.  Ubuntu offers LibreOffice Write, which is very much so comparable to Microsoft Office Word and user friendly but there is one options we will find difficult living without.  Write offers spell check but it does not offer a definition section or even a thesaurus and synonyms in order to find alternative words to use when writing reports.  However, most of us here use Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access and Ubuntu offers LibreOffice Calc and LibreOffice Base.  Here is where the compatibility issues have been found.  Pivots in excel are created every single day by our employees by extracting the data directly from Access queries, and this becomes difficult when all our current queries have been created using Microsoft Access.  I have attempted to convert one of our Access databases into a LibreOffice Base database and ran into much difficulty, not only with the compatibility but with the size of the data.  This caused my laptop to freeze and took roughly 10 minutes to reboot the database.  The size of our internal data seems to be an issue here and would cause much delay in productivity.  Along with, if one of our Account Executives were to open one of our current Excel workbooks within Ubuntu, they would lose the data linked to the pivots within and would have to create new pivots themselves.  In order for them to do this, we will have to begin saving the raw data to the actual Excel workbook and could run into the actual raw data being compromised by the Account Executives, in error, which would subsequently cause them to produce inaccurate analysis.

Another issue found, other than unproductive runtime, is the agreement into which we would be going into with Ubuntu.  The agreement they have put forward clearly states that by accepting the terms they have the right to observe how the user is using Ubuntu along with the content.  Ubuntu has the right to do so as to protect themselves from criminating data or content being produced from their product.  However, due to the sensitivity of our internal data, this could cause legal issues, as well as, putting us at risk of data leakage.

The conclusion extracted from this is that the amount of cost we pay yearly towards programing could in the long-run be decrease dramatically by the usage of this operating system.  However, productivity will be effected, our ability to maintain our work rhythm will be effected and will cause major delays.  More employees will have to be hired in order to meet our daily tasks, which this will take even more time as they will have to be trained in both procedures.  Our customer and clients will lose faith in us and we cannot guarantee we will be able to come back from such a large implementation.

With this, I hope all your questions have been cleared with this analysis.  If further analysis is required or if you have any questions please let me know as I will a solution to any of your doubts.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Couto

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