English 421Y: Technical Writing Online

For my first piece of research I have found an article outlining a case study of an actual school system in Portnland, OR that has implemented an Open Source solution over a Microsoft solution. The article goes into the cost analysis and how the managed some of the different costs and what the benefits and downfalls were of each implementation that they looked into

Paul Nelson, the Technology Director for the Riverdale School District in Portland, Oregon, makes a few comments in the article that bring some professional light to this subject. Having a good source like this will allow our article to bring some credibility into play and make the article ultimately more persuasive.

The article goes into the actual cost and implementation of the new system. It mentions the actual technology used and at what fraction of the cost they would have paid for a similar Microsoft implementation. The article also analyzed the pressing question of paying for support and maintenance fees. It outlined the ever so helpful open source community that practically gave them free support via online forums for the initial stages of implementation and on. This support is a great selling point of this implementation and can really help to show one of the great benefits of open source.

I think this article will really aid in building our credibility and making our article seem a little more professional. Also the in depth cost analysis could possibly be useful in making some sort of pie graph or chart to enhance our article and make the numbers a little easier to interpret when analyzing the costs. Overall the article is credible and will make our cost analysis just that easier.

http://www.linux.com/articles/22950