I don't see why you would automatically be in "a world of hurt". Yes, you might be if you were to suddenly roll it out organisation wide without any testing, but no sane IT department would do that. This is why you have internal test groups and pilot groups. Once you identify the limitations, you scope out the missing features/issues, engage developers if need be, or look for alternate solutions. No one needs to get hurt.

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tracker1 3 days ago | parent [-]

Will you, personally, volunteer to resolve all the issues when trying to convert the older Excel based workflows?

What's your approach to getting out of Access, Visio and Outlook integrations?

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d3Xt3r 3 days ago | parent [-]

No, but that's only because I hate Excel. But I'm sure developers who don't hate it but also appreciate FOSS solutions might be interested, if the pay is good.

Access = LibreOffice Base

Visio = LibreOffice Impress

Outlook = Schleswig-Holstein already switched successfully to Open-Xchange and Thunderbird, I've not heard of them running into any major issues with this setup.

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tracker1 2 days ago | parent [-]

And if the cost of (re)developing all the existing solutions exceeds the costs of MS licensing for a decade?

	▲	d3Xt3r 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I find that highly unlikely given how much commercial agreements with MS costs. But if that's the case then they should either look for a different COTS solution, and/or change their business workflow. And in the event even that is unfeasible, then just continue to keep a few windows machines (maybe convert them to VMs or VDIs for ease of maintenance) for the few users that can't be migrated.