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On Sat, 20 Mar 2010, tom brough wrote:
Open Standards - importance of and leverage for buisness.
The obvious is OpenOffice - but then if everyone has the same "standard" then it all "just works". Future Proof (and backwards compatability) is going to be important though - with Win Office 2xxx producing documents Office 97 can't read for example.
The other standard that I'm intersted in is telephony - in particular SIP. Now proprietary PBX venduhs sometimes do support VoIP, but a lot of the time it's not standards based, or if it is SIP, it's often "broken" or comes with a hefty license fee per extension or channel.
One of the beautys of SIP is that there are dozens of vendors of SIP devices with dozens of products in their range - giving the consumer a huge range of phones, etc. to choose from. (Although, sometimes this isn't that good a thing!)
Open Source awareness - strengths and weaknesses.
Strength is the wealth of community support - some will say that's a weakness, but you can alays buy support for open source in the same way you buy support for MS products.
Examples of open source adoptions in Community / Business.
So how many web design companies are writing php/perl/python, or integrating wordpress, joomla, drupal, sugar, etc. either for themselves, or for their clients? And how many hosting companies are relying 100% on Linux and other open source technologies?
Adoption strategies - analysis of strengths and weaknesses.
Support ...
Encourage local training programmes to support skill levels needed to support open source adoption in business.
The business "killer app" would be accounts management. Currently the single thing I need a Win box for is to run my accounts (although my invoice generation will be out of that loop by the end of this month and done in a php/latex mechanism)
I am generating a kdissert mind map at the moment which will hopefully feed into a presentation to the TDA. Ultimately I would like to be able to provide an open resource set that could be used to duplicate presentations tailored for other business interest groups. What I am really stuck with is finding articles (preferably with referenced statistics) that show how adoption of Open Source in economically deprived areas has stimulated the economy. This is probably because the real savings / costs are difficult to quantify to any degree of accuracy that researchers are confident to publish.
Torbay is a bit deprived, itsn't it? count the cost of Office licenses - you'll save that by simply moving to openOffice.
Then count the number of XP/Vista/Win7 licenses - you'll save that the next time a desktop needs upgrading/renewing.
Then move the file/data servers to Linux/FreeBSD, etc. and you'll save the Win server licenses and the multi-user licenses...
This may take years though and you'll still be left with the bespoke applications written to use MSQL (or access!)
However, the offset in saving will be put against additional training, but that's a one-off - to train the current trainers/help desk who then train the end-users.
A semi custome linux distro could be trivially put together - you probably have (or buy) a common set of PCs, so that ought to be relatively easy to get going. Provide a front-end that's similar enough to not cause too much confusion in the first instance.
In the meantime I will be getting back to my quest.... ;-)
Good luck! Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html