With that large of a setup I honestly think you ought to not look at Ubuntu and instead look at Red Hat or SuSE. Ubuntu has good community support and offers some commercial support, but they are on another planet compared to Red Hat and SuSE. For the x86 world, Red Hat is probably the best supported, and Red Hat has the largest network of support engineers and cooperating vendors.
For example, Red Hat is soon about to fully support Exchange 2007. Fedora 10 is featuring Samba 4 and _native_ Exchange 2007 MAPI support. _Native_, no OWA hacks or other such, so Evolution will work out of the box. If you're in an Exchange 2007 environment this will make a migration much easier for you, as you can deploy the workstations while keeping your mailserver, doing that final migration last.
Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based on Fedora, you can expect the Ex2007 support coming very soon, or you can probably port over the Fedora 10 packages yourself.
Red Hat also has by far the best training programs of any Linux vendor, and the RHCE is the gold standard in Linux certs. It's a much easier sell for business types than Ubuntu and possibly SuSE (my understanding is that in the mainframe world SuSE is the more popular).
If you go with a Red Hat scenario, I'd recommend using Fedora for your workstations and Red Hat Enterprise Server for your key servers. That would be the most economical. I'm a Red Hat Certified Engineer, so I can help you with detailed questions if you need them.
Good luck. Jeffrey.
P.S. This isn't meant to disparage either Ubuntu or SuSE. Both offer good support and are good distributions, but my experience has been that Red Hat's support, training, and professional services are far superior for businesses. Businesses care more about those things than they do about the minor differences between distributions.
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:25 AM, Haworth, Michael A. < [email protected]> wrote:
500+ WinXP desktop and laptop mix and 30 servers across threecontinents Exchange 2007 (kinda screws up using Evolution at this point, and probably not switching anytime soon) BES server Office 2003/2007 mix with everyone running Outlook 2007 - need pivot tables to work in OOo spreadsheet Vellum Graphite (has a *nix distro) Currently implementing Sharepoint - would love to find an OS alternate for this Access '97 database that must be accessible by about 45 users