[TriLUG] Crossover Office runs Office2K very well.

[Chris Hedemark]

On Mon, 2002-04-08 at 21:55, karl thiele wrote:

> I do not often get excited about a product, but it has been wonderful so 
> far. It is also faster than W2K, Excel starts up in about 5 seconds. 

That's not a very impressive time.  Let me share a secret with you. 
Great way to speed up relative performance of MS Office on a LAN.

I once did this as an experiment for a client, oh about 5 years ago, and
it works really well.

Get yourself a number of file servers. As few as 2 and as many as...
well, I tested with 5 and it worked great.  Now install Office 2K onto
these servers using the administrative install method.  This is a
longstanding feature of Office that is not well known among the paper
sysadmins.  So let's say you have 5 file servers now, all sharing MS
Office 2000 (read only).

Great, now go to your Dfs server (you *are* running Dfs, aren't you?)
and set up one directory in the Dfs for MS Office, five times, pointing
to each of your five servers.

Go to a few Windows machines on your LAN, any machines, and install MS
Office from this Dfs share and make it a network install so that only a
few megs of files are copied to the local workstation and the rest run
off the network.

Now start MS Office on one machine.  Pretty quick, huh?  Not yet.  Now
you just populated the cache on the server.  Go to your next workstation
and try that.

Keep in mind my initial experiments with this took place in 1997.  The
client workstations were Pentium 133's with maybe 32MB of RAM, 10Mbps
ethernet, etc.  The servers weren't much faster, but they were on a
100Mbps switch.  IIRC Excel would open in about 1 or 2 seconds for most
people.  Granted, this was Office 97.  It would be nice to replicate
this configuration in a modern networking environment and see how it
holds up.

I think the latest versions of Samba can act as a Dfs server if I am not
mistaken.  If so, one should be able to set up a farm of desktop
application file servers very cheaply using Linux (or I would probably
use OpenBSD for this), rsync, and samba.  Set one of these guys up as
the master server that replicates new applications down to the others.

> Go check it out!  I now see no reason for a M$ desktop! Well visio....

The Kompany has a look-alike product but I haven't tried it yet.

-- 
***********************************************************
| Rev. Chris Hedemark, DD
| Hillsborough, NC
| http://yonderway.com
| GPG Public Key - http://yonderway.com/chris/hedemark.gpg
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