Display Works Interview

Interviewed by Christopher TenHarmsel

Just over a year ago, Display Works Inc. adopted KDE as their official desktop environment. I had a chance to ask Tim Brodie a few questions about how they are using KDE in their business.

What is your company's line of business and what types of products or services does it offer?

Display Works Inc is a manufacturer of custom retail store fixtures and point of purchase displays. We manufacture using acrylic, wood and metal in our 63,000 square foot facility in Markham, Ontario Canada.

Everything that we build is custom built for a specific client and for a specific job that our client is doing. Our clients include national department stores, brand name specialty stores, mass merchandizers, architects and designers both in Canada and the United States. We have shipped product all over North America as well as Guam, Saipan and Australia.

How is KDE meeting your company's IT requirements on a day to day basis, and what are the KDE applications that you find most useful in meeting those requirements?

We began about a year ago to migrate our desktops to KDE 2.1.2 for our front office staff. We intentionally provided very little in the way of training to give us a real evaluation of KDE as a desktop. Our staff are generally not at all sophisticated computer users, and we wanted a direct experiential measurement as to what we would call the "competence" of KDE as a work environment.

The experiment was a tremendous success. The support issues that would arise time and again had to do with the relative maturity of KDE as a desktop, such as how seamless kprinter was to the end user, and the cut and paste paradigm that seemed broken to them. However, for day to day use, KDE provided a consistent and usable interface for our users.

In the beginning of May 2003, we migrated forward to KDE 3.1, and our staff have been very excited; "blown away" is probably closer to the mark. All of the little niggly things were now fixed, and the improvements to the user interface made their work a much more enjoyable experience.

Approximately 60% of our desktops are running KDE 3.1 today. All of our sales and clerical staff are using KDE to do their day to day work. They are using Konqueror for web browsing and working with their own files.

We have been using OpenOffice.org for our office package because of the maturity of KOffice when we started our first implementation. We are now reviewing that decision and seeing if KOffice will be a fit for our business requirements.

Our business email is based on IMAP/SSL access, since a number of our sales people need to access their email while on the road. The only current isssue with KMail is that we can't do filtering from the inbox to an IMAP folder. This is important to us as some of our staff have POP accounts with other ISP's and need to filter mail into their IMAP folders. We won't be able to move to KMail until this can happen, even though I think it is a very strong email client.

Was KDE useful or instrumental in solving problems or helping with any special needs of the company?

Absolutely. Display Works has been growing at a tremendous pace over the last five years. It has been a real hardship to us to try to keep pace buying software licenses for the additional staff we have been hiring. Also, in this time the Wintel cartel has been demanding upgrades to our hardware as well as our software at a rate that really wasn't sustainable.

Almost two years ago, we began cautiously migrating our infrastructure servers to Linux. The improvement in stability and performance was so remarkable that we committed to migrate everything we could to Linux, within our operating business constraints.

When we looked at whether or not we could migrate some of our desktops to Linux, one of the criteria affecting our selection of desktop was whether or not a computer illiterate user could sit down and be productive. And the second criteria was whether or not that same desktop would annoy our computer literate users (insert my name here).

We were also looking to build some custom software for doing project estimation, and so I was looking for a LGPL library that would provide the most mature and complete function set to facilitate that development.

We evaluated a number of desktops and came to the conclusion that KDE was our best candidate. The real test came when we rolled it out and watched our untrained users. That was really cool.

What kinds of and how many computers are using KDE?

We are operating a LTSP server with (at this date) twelve concurrent users. We also have another four stand-alone workstations used at some of our other sites.

All our workstations are off-lease Compaq DP4000's and Dell Optiplex's that have been stripped of moving parts (except for the power supply fans) and do PXE boots from the LAN.

One of the things I really appreciated about the migration to 3.1 was that our memory and CPU requirements dropped significantly. Thanks! Our LTSP server is an off-lease Compaq Proliant 1600 450-SMP with 512MB of RAM, 1GB of swap and 18GB of Raid-5 SCSI.

Our users really have no clue that they are sharing one application server with eleven other people. Most of our users have 21" monitors using 16bpp color.

We have determined that this approach should scale easily to dozens if not hundreds of users by a judicious selection of application server and proper network segmentation. We believe we can add another six users to our existing configuration without any hardware changes.

What were your reasons for choosing KDE over other available desktops?

Quite a number really:

• KDE provides stability, performance and UI consistency
• KDE provides diversity of eye candy to facilitate ownership of the desktop by the end user
• KDE provides ease of use for a computer illiterate user, and insulates her from some of the *nix complexity
• KDE doesn't get in the way of a sophisticated user, and in many ways helps (like sometimes *gasp* I use the Control Center interface to my printers!)
• KDE provides an excellent LGPL library for development of in-house applications
• KDE provides one of the best IDE's I've seen
• KDE is easy on the eyes even after 12 hours of use
• KDE provides network transparency to access some of our network based resources such as SMB

Was deploying KDE in your environment easy? If so, what made it easy? What could be done to make it easier?

KDE 3.1 was very easy. In a business environment (read few computer geeks), things that are "in-my-sleep" easy to a computer geek are basically impossible for a regular business user.

What made KDE easy was how much effort the KDE team has put into the user interface. I've lurked on the development lists for a couple of years now and know how difficult some of the design decisions have been. The real art of KDE has been the way the team is resolving these issues without creating too much frustration with the sophisticated user. I think that the KDE team should be proud of the success of their collaboration.

Much of our pain for migration came more from our distribution. The menu structure had changed and I needed to trash some subdirectories and files so that some reinitialization was done.

I can see in the future that there may be some cause for me to not want to use the KDE setup provided by my distribution, but currently scratch building a full release is somewhat difficult. It would be really cool if there was a tool that could tell me the configure options that were selected for the currently running KDE! I'm pretty comfortable scratch building software on Linux, but so far KDE has been pretty difficult.

What could KDE do in the future to help companies and users work with KDE?

I guess the key word is "interoperability". That's much easier to say than do, but it's really critical to our business. Interoperability might mean something somewhat different to KDE than it would perhaps to the kernel or to a service such as sendmail.

For example, we still maintain a number of WinXP workstations running AutoCad that are used by our planners to draw what we are manufacturing. We looked at QCad and have purchased a closed source product called VariCad. However, we determined that converting drawings to and from AutoCads proprietary format was too large a business risk. Our customers still demand exhanging AutoCad drawings, so we use AutoCad for now.

We are currently satisfied with document conversion with OpenOffice. However, OpenOffice is a pretty large product and generates a larger memory footprint than we would use if we are able to use KOffice. We are just beginning to check out document exchange with KOffice to see if we can collapse our OpenOffice implementation.

We are watching with great interest KDE's goal of network transparency and the rise of applications such as Kolab. We have been waiting for a mature open source PIM to become available, and Kolab is certainly looking good.

If you could see one type of application offered by KDE (that isn't currently offered), what would it be?

I guess it's not really a product, but functionality that should underlay most of what KDE is doing. One of the most significant costs to migrating a business user (after raining) is to import or continue to use her existing document base with the new product. Effort put into migration-enabling filters may be a lower priority for the KDE developer, it is crucial to the business user.

The first question I was asked when proposing a move from IE/Outlook on MS to Konqueror/Mozilla on KDE was "Yeah, but what about my bookmarks and address book?" The next was "Oh, can I look at Flash sites on the net?"

Also, we receive a large volume of email attachments from our clients that are generated by the various MS-based proprietary packages. Our customers expect us to be able to work with these documents, and believe me they aren't interested in being taught about the business and operational advantages of open standards (they will some day).

So until open standards rule the world (and they will), I would recommend that we facilitate the migration of their business documents until critical mass is achieved.

Any other comments or suggestions?

Please keep the healthy tension between ease of use and sophistication. I'm working at being a KDE/Qt developer, I'm our company's SysAdmin and IT Manager (and operationally a CTO). KDE is the first graphical user interface that I'm glad to use every day. And you know what, so is our Accounts Payable clerk! Now that's very broad acceptance.

I now see KDE taking the lead in polish and professionalism on the desktop over any of the other incumbents. Well done!

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Tim Brodie is an IT Manager, Systems Administrator, and Software Developer for Display Works Inc.

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