Johnny Karlsson
IT manager, City of Eksjö

The city of Eksjö stood before a number of issues which needed to be addressed: The schools had an aging computer park which needed to be fixed as soon as possible, while the local authorities also needed to save money. In addition the software licenses were a big expenditure for the schools, plus that there was a jungle of different programs causing problems for the support. A solution with Server-Based Computing was seen as suitable, and the municipality had evaluated Citrix MetaFrame earlier, but concluded that it wasn't attractive enough as an alternative, cost wise.

ThinLinc would solve the problem of the aging computer park and by centralizing the software the problem of faulty installations in the schools would be alleviated. But the cost of software licenses would still be a problem. Only when an IT employee started to interest the local authorities in Linux as a replacement, did it look like it was possible to solve the municipality's dilemma.

"It wasn't easy to get that idea across to the schools" says Johnny Karlsson, IT manager for the Eksjö municipality. "Every teacher wanted to keep their own programs, because they were used to them and claimed they needed exactly those programs for their classes."

In order to get the schools to accept the changes it was important to have an IT pedagogue in the process, who functioned as a link to the teachers. He evaluated Open Source programs to find programs to substitute for the expensive software in use. The focus for the project was on the function, rather than the program itself.

"He has done a tremendous job in finding alternative software with the same function as the ones we were using" Johnny says. "He is also out on the schools two days a week and talks to the teachers, and this facilitates our work. It's usually impopular when we come from outside and tells them that 'now this is what we will do', but if it's coming from another teacher it's easier to accept new ideas."

Johnny continues: "There are of course some programs which we can't replace, for instance multimedia software which has no corresponding software on Linux and which we will continue to run on fully installed workstations, but we calculate that we will be running 70% Server-Based Computing via ThinLinc."

Customized desktops are used for the students in different grades, so that the students of one grade only have access to the programs needed for the education for that grade. This makes it easier for both students and teachers, since they don't have access to programs which they don't need. The desktops are also made to be more and more Windows-like so the students recognize them from other computers.