IT Manager's Journal

For IT managers researching software purchases, the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. While there is an abundance of information available on virtually every piece of software on the market, knowing which software -- or whose -- to trust is part skill and part luck. The process is also difficult because typical software review Web sites don't allow users to customize search criteria based on their unique needs, so Internet-based research is often painstaking and sometimes fruitless. Nicolas Vandenberghe, founder and CEO of the new site ITerating, hopes to ease the pain of software comparison shopping by blending the usefulness of user reviews with the power of wiki-based search functionality.

The Kamloops/Thompson School District in British Columbia, Canada, is a free software success story. Gregg Ferrie, manager of information technology for the district, believes its infrastructure may be "the largest Linux on-the-desktop implementation in Western Canada" in public education. According to Ferrie, hardly a week goes by without another of British Columbia's more than 60 school districts consulting Kamloops. Currently, five other districts are considering or planning to implement the Kamloops district's custom-built thin client solution, and the department of education at the University of British Columbia is also investigating the possibility.

A chance encounter with a Linux-based laptop started South Carolina-based radio communications dealer Voicelink Communications on the path to replacing almost its entire range of Windows-based productivity and desktop software with free and open source software (FOSS).

In 2000, when Theresa Friday, Ray Waldin, and Jeff Luszcz were working for dot-com startup Cacheon, they saw firsthand the power of open source software to impact a business model. In Cacheon's case, it looked like open source had dealt a death blow to the company, but it was really careless use of third-party code that was the source of the trouble, Friday says. The three colleagues were so impacted by what they had seen that they launched a new business designed to help other companies prevent implosion from software licensing issues.

The official release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) is still a couple of months away, yet already, the misunderstandings about it are almost as numerous as those for the second version (GPLv2).

Open source advocate David Skoll launched Roaring Penguin Software in 1999 because he was restless in his job as R&D project leader at Chipworks, Inc. Roaring Penguin started strictly as a consultancy, but the next year, after Skoll was commissioned to create software to help London's Royal College of Physicians stem the tide of email viruses and spam to its servers, he decided the world needed a better email filter. Skoll wrote the now ubiquitous MIMEDefang email filter, released it to the community, and proceeded to build a successful business on top of GPL software.

When you're designing and developing new software systems, it is often hard to see how all the pieces are suppose to fit together. Unified Modeling Language (UML) is one tool that allow developers and architects to ease the process and create a big picture before committing to a particular technology.

Everyone knows that Napoleon's invasion of Russia failed because it ran into the Russian winter, right? But the truth is, saying that is as incomplete as saying that the cause of every death is heart failure. The winter may have been the final blow to Napoleon's grand design, but it need not have been. The campaign actually failed because of difficulties in scaling, combined with poor management by Napoleon himself. His example provides a case study on the pitfalls of planning a large project, making it an object lesson for the modern corporate world.

O'Brien Automotive Team is a large car dealership conglomerate based in Peoria, Ill. When the company built new headquarters recently, it needed a phone system flexible and cost-effective enough to satisfy the needs of 200 employees at the home office, and hundreds more staff at nine local dealerships in four states. After evaluating options and wrangling with incompetent vendors, O'Brien went with an open source Asterisk solution.

Universal Electronics Inc. (UEI), best known for its line of universal remote controls, also sells SimpleCenter, an all-in-one application for Windows PCs that ties together in a single interface all of a user's multimedia devices and software. It streamlines the management of photos, music, and movies, and even acts as a Universal Plug and Play server so you can stream your files to any device on your home network, while the software converts files to the proper format for the device. Recently, UEI released the basic version of SimpleCenter under the terms of the GNU General Public License in order to take advantage of the community's ability to make the software better faster than the company can do it alone.

I broke down and read Getting Things Done (GTD) in February (after letting the book sit unopened on the couch for a month). When I finished, I was determined to adopt the popular organizational method. I searched for a solid software tool to track projects and next actions, and found dozens of desktop-oriented applications to choose from. One of the GTD axioms is to collect all of your tasks, projects, and lists in one place; since I regularly use four PCs and laptops and a mobile phone, finding a GTD-aware tool that would run as a Web app was paramount. I settled on Tracks; it is open source, easy to use, and accessible from anywhere.

Both IT folklore and current events are full of examples of institutions that fruitlessly expend enormous energy and financial resources to create or improve some element of their information technology. As an IT manager, it's your responsibility to help preserve institutional resources as well as add organizational value with IT projects. In many cases you can do this by facilitating selection of the most worthy projects, then insuring their successful implementation and management. Consider these tips to avoid scheduling your next project for failure.

Good, strong, repeatable processes can be the cornerstone of successful IT projects. Processes can make the pieces of the project puzzle fit together. Knowing that things are done the same way every time gives project team members and customers confidence that nothing is missed and that the results are trustworthy, useful, and usable. But at the same time, processes can be a pitfall when they are overly rigid, poorly structured, or have a negative impact on cost, schedule, or quality. Here are some common-sense ideas about how to make process work for you, not against you.

Last week, two years since its last major release, the CentOS project released version 5 of its enterprise-focused Linux distribution. I downloaded it and put it to the test, and found that CentOS 5 has maintained its tradition of robustness and reliability while adding new features like virtualization.

A few years ago, Erik Dahl was a network manager who knew that administrators needed a flexible network monitoring solution. In 2002, he began development of what would become Zenoss, an open source network monitoring product that runs on multiple platforms. Dahl found that the best way to deliver a product that is affordable and customizable is to use open source, and in the process he also discovered that using open source internally is the best way to build a successful business from scratch.

Adobe recently created a media buzz with the announcement of a cross-platform Web-enabled runtime environment, code named Apollo. The environment allows developers to create applications that run directly on the desktop while using content from the Web. Adobe has built Apollo to leverage existing technologies such as Flash, Flex, HTML, and AJAX. Apollo is an amazing concept, but it is not a new idea. Sun Microsystems released Java Web Start in 2001, and the Mozilla Foundation invented XUL when it created Firefox. There are also several startups entering the market. All of their products are geared do the same thing: bring Web applications to the desktop.

Mule is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) -- the "glue" between different enterprise applications in different company departments that allows IT managers to move information back and forth seamlessly. Think of disparate enterprise applications as ribs, with the ESB as a backbone that connects everything. Mulesource founder Ross Mason says open source is the best way to make an ESB that is customizable and affordable.

An Atlanta IT security company is finding success by employing open source software, not just in the network security appliance it sells, but on its own desktops and servers.

A "Microsoft-centric" call center solution provider called Promero worked mostly with proprietary applications, offering them as hosted software-as-a-service products. When it decided to create a custom replacement by cobbling together an existing CRM package and its own lead-generating application, CTO Roman Schepis quickly discovered that the only way to go was to use an open source CRM application.

Managing documentation and support requests and collaborating effectively are difficult tasks for many organizations. Most companies have separate systems to track customer information, handle support, and manage a general knowledge base, but when someone needs a 360-degree view of a project, or needs to find all of the information on a client, the task can be next to impossible. Why not glue all of your separate systems together using wiki software?