NHS delivers swift kick to Microsoft's wallet over fee demands Microsoft is finding out that it doesn't always pay to play nasty with large government customers: NHS procurement bosses are telling authorities and bodies to hold firm against a wave of licensing compliance threats. As exclusively revealed by The Channel last week, Microsoft wrote to all 160 healthcare bodies across England …
In my experience changing desktops and user interface is not a big issue. It's made to sound much worse than it really is. Microsoft does nothing much better on the desktop than anything else these days.
People have adapted quickly enough to say tablets or mobiles.
The problems are always the apps. Stuff like IE only applications or other proprietary apps. The government should be looking at apps/data that are generally accessible from any OS and remove the dependency on any specific desktop. Who knows what might be running on the desktop in 10 years (if indeed we still run desktops). Yes I am sure there will still be a need for some specific stuff and that cannot de discounted entiterely
Yes I love my linux but its not the be all and end all. The focus should not be on the OS but open standards. What you use to access that data should be largely irrelevant.
It might take time and money now, but will certainly save it in the long run.
License Management is relatively easy; run a piece of asset management software that can interrogate licenses against a license pool. That allows you to claw licenses back from machines not using it over a period of time or any other metric.
Again, Citrix can come in handy; say you have 5 licenses for visio, 10 people who have a usage requirement. Install on Citrix farm and restrict to 5 concurrent sessions, push out enterprise receiver to deliver the icon to those 10 users.
... not since the last century at any rate.
10 Citrix Users who use Visio = 10 user licenses required. Concurrency does not enter into it. If you have a volume license then you can 'float' licenses between users (or devices if device licensed) - but only once each 90 days.
Same goes for Office and pretty much everything else in the MS desktop catalog.
Of course, if you have Office on a users desktop PC *and that is covered by a current SA agreement* then that user is licensed for Citrix use. No SA = no remote use rights.
I believe this is referred to by license administrators as "a bitch".
Moorfields eye hospital, contributes to OpenEyes an opensource EPR.
You can implement Mule to do HL7 messaging between healthcare and other systems.
My Trust use a variant of an independent EPR which was originally Notes based but has been migrated to SQL and IE. We assisted the developers in porting it to resilient front end web app servers and a backend sql cluster - it has only recently edged towards an html 5 client, and the developers still don't digitally sign their browser plugins.
We are so close to not needing Windows when this goes to html5 it hurts - and the driver? someone wants it on an iPad!
We have a full time band 5 employee who manages our license compliance, but only since the exit from the EWA was upon us in 2010, we are compliant and we frequently bat back attempts by MS to hype us into a new EWA, procure more licenses or generally panic buy.
We have frequently had to step in following MS showing Lync or Windows Surface or something and explain "we have that already, just somebody else's version - what functionality do you specifically want?"
When the revolution comes, MS Public Sector sales reps should be first up against the wall .... bloody vultures.
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