GP body favours Linux over Microsoft

Doctors' body the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) has chosen Linux over Microsoft for a bulk email and web initiative because of better performance and cost results. The RCGP is the main academic body for GPs and acts as the voice of the profession on education, training and standards issues and is engaged in two ‘quality initiatives’ that involve bulk email bulletins to members and the web enablement of other functions.

The controversy over changes to Microsoft’s licensing schemes last year was one of the factors that affected the RCGP’s decision to try Linux for these initiatives, according to its IT manager, Tony Betts.

“We are not totally convinced we should stay with Microsoft as a long-term approach. The recent area of concern over the licensing has caused us to re-evaluate things. Basically we are keeping our options open,” he told silicon.com. For the bulk email and web-enablement projects the charity is switching from Microsoft Exchange 5.5 and a Microsoft platform running on Apache web servers, to open source applications from Trustix running on IBM xSeries hardware.

Betts said Exchange could not cope with sending out 6,000 bulk emails every two months to member GPs and that this was now done cheaper and in just two hours. “We found the Exchange server could not cope with the volume going through it. We even tried shareware solutions for SMTP servers but they were literally taking days to send the email out and we weren’t confident all the emails were going through.” The RCGP is now looking at adding more security as it expands its LAN-based services and increasing the number of web-enabled initiatives for its members.

The various offices of the RCGP - serving just over 20,000 member GPs from 31 local branches across the UK - are also set to evaluate the capability of open source products for the desktop over the next few months after being convinced of its suitability in the business environment.

Betts said: “Within our group of IT managers we are setting up a sub-group to evaluate this and look at office-based products - certainly StarOffice and things like that.”

The RCGP said it is, however, still using Microsoft as its main infrastructure platform and Exchange as its core email application.