Novell chief information officer (CIO) Debra Anderson was given the task of migrating all of the company's 6,000 staff from Microsoft Windows to Novell Linux on the desktop. In an exclusive interview with vnunet.com she details the project and the lessons it provided.

How did you go about planning the migration at the start?

Planning is most critical. We created a site called the 'Open Zone', a one-stop shop for anything related to our 'Open Desktop Initiative', our project name.

From that one site staff can get training, downloads, communications [on] what we're doing, where we're at in the project. It's our second most frequently visited internal site.

I sat one-to-one with each of the executive team, communicated what we wanted to accomplish in what timeframe, then lined them up with a call to action which they then passed to their staff.

Then each of them nominated an advocate as our key contact in their organisations, and we created this big, virtual team.

So I'd say our second most critical thing was communication, rallying the leadership team on what we wanted to accomplish. We really had to lay out how to do this.

I created a couple of key targets for the year. One was to move 90 per cent of Novell to OpenOffice by 31 July. The second was 50 per cent of Novell to Novell's Linux desktop by 31 October.

Novell's Linux desktop is in a state of flux, so that presents additional problems, doesn't it?

It does. We set those goals knowing the development cycle. The advantage to the OpenOffice move was that OpenOffice.org is already available [and] we were able to move Novell without moving their desktops and things that are more disruptive to the individual.

That got every individual in Novell involved. They all had to do something by a certain date. My measurement of success for that goal is that every individual has OpenOffice, [and] all internal collaboration in Novell is happening with OpenOffice.

What we did learn - and it's an important part of why we're doing this - is a view of impediments. We found that for certain functions for certain departments, there were reasons to still have active Microsoft Office usage. Application plug-ins is an example.

Aren't they all moving to open source?

But right now they're not there. So those applications assume an import or export function is into or out of [Microsoft] Excel. We've had years of history where Microsoft is the default.

We [also] hit a few functional things we fed back to both Novell development and the open source community. One example: Calc, the OpenOffice equivalent to Excel, has a 32K limit on table size. I have functional users who can't live with that limit [so] are still using Excel.

We have about an 87 per cent active OpenOffice usage. I feel good about that. Although we didn't get to 90 per cent, we accomplished what we were out to do.

Now to the Linux desktop, the next goal. We have about 3,000 to 3,200 employees [out of 6,000] who've already implemented a Linux desktop, but various versions. We're taking regular revisions from our development team [and] many people went ahead and implemented SuSE Linux Enterprise Edition, a component of the Novell Linux desktop.

We'll hit 50 per cent by the end of October. We'll continue to learn as we do that.

Have you got any further targets in that schedule? Are you going for 90 or 100 per cent?

Yes, a 100 per cent target at the end of our second quarter, the end of April.

So what are your biggest roadblocks?

The personal, cultural change. That goes hand in hand with this kind of project. All CIOs have internal customers who adopt quickly and who adopt slowly.

Did you need a training programme?

[For] OpenOffice we were pleasantly surprised. It really wasn't that different.

On the web we found quick reference materials [and] very good training materials. Then we started to create an FAQ [frequently asked questions] list. These are all on the portal site. We did offer formal training [but] we've had very few people take us up on it.

[For] the Linux desktop, [it's] a little early to tell you. The Novell Linux desktop may have different colours than Microsoft, but it's got icons you click on and they open. Right now I anticipate quick reference materials [and] FAQs. As we hear things we'll communicate them back out. But I don't think we'll be sitting [users] down in a classroom even for an hour.

What steps do you recommend to a reasonable-sized company thinking of migrating?

Think seriously about that first move away from the Microsoft productivity suite to OpenOffice.

Most corporations will make the move based on business targets. Certain customers don't use the full [Windows] features. They access maybe two to three business applications per day [and] live in those applications maybe the full day. There's no reason why, when they're going to do a refresh, they don't go for Linux. It's easy.

It gets more difficult for the knowledge worker - actually the majority in Novell - that use all the features and functions of their equipment, including wireless, all the productivity suites and a large set of applications.