London Council Dumping Windows For Chromebooks To Save £400,000 193
girlmad writes: "Google has scored a major win on the back of Microsoft's Windows XP support cut-off. The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham has begun moving all its employees over to Samsung Chromebooks and Chromeboxes ahead of the 8 April deadline. The council was previously running 3,500 Windows XP desktops and 800 XP laptops, and is currently in the process of retiring these in favour of around 2,000 Chromebooks and 300 Chromeboxes. It estimates the savings at around £400,000 compared to upgrading to newer Windows machines — no small change."
Re:Something's fishy... (Score:2, Informative)
You didn't read the article.
What they are actually doing is using Windows 7, and Office on virtual desktops and connecting using Citrix from Chomebooks.
The reduction in machines comes from employees only having a chrome books rather than a laptop and a desktop.
I highly doubt this will save any money the headline figure is probably due to different pots of money being used for different infrastructure.
Re:Biggest saving is... (Score:5, Informative)
2300 Chrome machines vs. 4300 XP machines, I wonder what the true saving are. Since the totals doesn't add up, what did they do eliminate 2000 workers and 2000 machines, or are they going to make 2000 workers use pen and paper or am I missing some here?
No idea why the numbers changed (though it is pretty common in mass-update situations like this to audit workstation assignments and get rid of all the extra laptops that got requisitioned so that somebody could have two/etc).
However, I can easily see why a Chromebook is cheaper in a corporate environment, assuming it can run all your software. They're nearly zero-effort to deploy (just log in once using an admin account and it auto-provisions), self-update automatically, don't need antivirus, already have full-disk encryption and secure boot, and Google handles all the identity management. You only use them with remote applications (web or otherwise), so there is nothing to backup locally, and no retention issues with legal holds. Basically you can eliminate almost your entire workstation-management infrastructure, and the hardware isn't really any more expensive than what you'd otherwise purchase. If somebody breaks their laptop, they just go over to the supply closet and get a new one, log in, and in 30 seconds everything is auto-synced.
The catch is that you have to be able to run EVERYTHING in Chrome.
A chromebook gives any business a fairly complete enterprise-level workstation management service for free. To get to all the management functions you need a Google Apps account, but even Grandma gets a laptop that can't get viruses, backs up everything important offsite automatically, auto-updates, and which is fully encrypted. That is a whole bunch of software/configuration/caretaking if you want to do it on Windows.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Informative)
actually no. RTFM: London council dumping their old remote terminal and web browsing desktop machines with shiny new remote terminal and web browsing machines. Shiny new machines that are significantly cheaper.
They are also buying new Windows 7 PCs for specialist apps that don't run over RDP.
One thing to note: Windows 8 was not even considered (Mac and Linux considered but not chosen, due to the particular use-case they needed)