Other than that, something that applies for all users, start using OpenOffice and Netscape (last version), this apps are already available on UNIX and once they get comfortable with them they are ready. You can also make a research exactly what apps do your users use and check the availability of similar applications for UNIX.
3. Acutal migration
There is nothing special to do once former XP users already are using Netscape, OpenOffice, putty and cygwin. Once they sit on a real UNIX machine they will feel much more comfortable. Moreover konqueror will offer them features that are very UNIX friendly while Explorer didn't - for example they can set permissions by accessing file properties, or they can do create symbolik links ('ln -s') by just dragging the dir in konqueror. Users are much happier with a real UNIX instead of the UNIX simulation ran on former XP box - konsole is better than putty, konqueror is better than explorer, Mozilla is same as Netscape, OpenOffice is exact the same, and even more on UNIX they would have much more apps - there are tons of free apps on UNIX.
4. What's next
Start thinking how to migrate other users to UNIX. For some of them may be the only option will be Mac since it's right now the only UNIX with full set of apps that XP users use. Probably in long term strong commercial apps like Photoshop, Corel or Flash currently supported only for one UNIX platform - Mac, would start supporting other UNIXes. Also you can help your customers to start migration, give them advices to use Netscape (strnong points are that this is business-branded version of Mozilla, has much better security compared to IE and has tabs), also OpenOffice has some stong points (it's free, it supports more formats than MS, it makes PDF (you have first to explain why PDF is good format for documents)). At later point you can have your customers with small router and a local UNIX Samba server if they have more than 3 machines. The direction is clear UNIX everything!
5. Optional step - Motivation
If you are a GPL fan you replace everything 'UNIX' in this article with 'Linux', and you can explain to people why GPL is the best to express such motivation to migrate. However if you are BSD & UNIX fan you would explain to people about the >30 history of UNIX. You would explain why GPL is not good. You would explain why UNIX is reliabe, proven and so on, you could also mention about BSD, X, Apache and MIT licenses and the major difference to GPL. You could also exlain about the unix heritage of BSD, etc, etc whoever prefers a real UNIX compared to UNIX immitation knows the story.
6. Background
All this is real story. I was planning to add a X server running on the XP box to ease the migration, but I found this irrelevant since KDE is very friendly these days. The only problem we had with KDE was that in version 3.1.4 on FreeBSD 4.9 the folders in konqueror tree are "sticking" to the mouse cursor when you click them, however after recompiling it it was fine.
7. Notes for follow up articles and future work
Expect more articles like this, detailing on certain aspects and points of the migration. Author is commited to advocate UNIX migration and will contribute more material. Three important subjects would be covered in future articles:
1) Detailization of migration processes and tech-related tips for configuration (including helpful links of howtos and manuals)
2) Advocating and motivation articles on why to choose UNIX, why to migrate, and how to convince your staff and customers
3) BSD&UNIX phylosophy and topics on Free Market + Open Srouce
About the Author: Anton Velev is long term BSD and UNIX advocate and old KDE user. Although he didn't contribute any code to OSS project, he spreads UNIX revolution by posting articles and forum posts, migrating and training his staff and customers and advicing other people to migrate and how to do so. He is commited to continue contribution of his advocating articles and for future to fund and contribute open source projects with code, documentation and guides/tips/tutorials/howtos.
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