Linux Powered Office Infrastructure

Here is the situation. Someone that you know, your brother-in-law, your cousin, your minister, your ...., well someone, wants to setup a back office computing operation for a small business, or an organization, or something. They know that you are a computer expert. They ask you what to do.

You, being completely committed to open software and not being quick enough to have hidden, want to respond with a complete solution. What do you do?

What functions might they need? What software should you install to meet those needs? Then how do you setup those software systems and how do you administer them? Don't worry about money. There is none. You will be using mostly hand-me-down hardware and only new store-bought-stuff if absolutly necessary and if the price is low.

An introduction to each of them with a chance for feedback, to get an idea of what our membership would like to hear more about at future meetings.

It has been mentioned that we could try to actually install and configure parts of this. There seems to be far too many things in our solution to install anything during the meeting. If anyone wants guidance with selection, installation, setup and administration of these parts bring it up and I'm sure someone will be more than glad to help.

Components:

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is a requirement, where possible.

The Steps

1. (Jim McQuillan) Select an ISP and register a domain name.

2. (Andrew Forgue) Select an Operating System/Distribution/Derivative

• LINUX
  • Red Hat
    • CentOS
    • White Box Linux
  • Mandriva
    • PCLinuxOS
  • Debian
    • [U|K|X|E]buntu[Lite]
      • SimplyMEPIS
  • SUSE
  • Gentoo
  • Slackware
• BSD
  • FreeBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • NetBSD
  • DragonFly BSD
  • DesktopBSD
  • PC-BSD

3. (Flav DeCosta) Setup Network/System Functions

• DNS/named
• dhcp
• Firewall
  • IPCop
  • Shorewall/Shorline
  • SmoothWall
  • eBox
• VPN
• traffic shaping/QOS
• Content filtering/access control – this is also related to wireless access
  • DansGuardian
• Monitoring/management
  • SNMP

4. (Andrew Forgue) User Management, Authentication/Access Control

• LDAP

5. Wireless management

• inside the firewall secure, encrypted
• outside the firewall for guests, sales staff

6. (Jim Gluting) File Access

• SMB
• Samba
• SSLBridge (http://sslbridge.com)
• NFS

7. (Mark Thuemmel) E-mail

• Server
  • Postfix
• Spam filtering
  • ASSP
• Clients
  • Web-based SquirrelMail
  • POP/IMAP
    • Thunderbird
• Virus and Phishing control
  • Amavisd-new
    • ClamAV

8. (Aaron King) Backup

• Applications
  • BackupPC
  • AMANDA
• Media
  • Tape
  • CD/DVD/BD
  • Removable drives
• Off-site

9. (Aaron Thul) Audio/Video Communications

• Asterisk
• Skype
• Google Talk
• H.323
• SIP

10. (someOne or J.MQ) Internet/Intranet

• Web (access to the)
• Apache serving the web
• Wiki
• IRC
• Instant Messaging
• Servers/protocols
  • Jabber
• Clients
  • PSI Jabber Client
  • GAIM

11. Scheduling/Meeting

• Calendaring
  • Mozilla Sunbird
• Whiteboard

12. Hardware

• Power over Ethernet (POE)
• Wireless
• UPS
• System monitoring (sensors, SMART)

13. (someOne) Printing

• what's the difference between lp and lpr
• Server
  • CUPS
• Maintenance
  • Manufacturer/model-specific utilities
• Facsimile
  • HylaFAX
• Auditing

14. (Dave Satwicz) Desktop Environment

• GNOME
• KDE
• XFCE
• LTSP thin clients
• mac/Apple
• Windows

• Office Suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations)
  • OpenOffice.org
  • StarOffice
  • KOffice

• Contact Management
  • Address book
    • Kontact
  • Mobile phone integration
    • KMobileTools

• • CRM (Aaron Thul)

• Accounting
  • Appgen MyBooks
  • Compiere
  • GnuCash
  • Quasar Accounting
  • TurboCASH
  • osFinancials
  • SQL-Ledger

• Image Scanning
  • SANE clients
  • Sharing (Unix, Windows, Mac)

• Legacy application support
  • Via compatibility layers
    • Wine
      • Crossover Office
    • DOSBox
  • Via virtualization
    • VMWare
    • QEMU/KQEMU
  • Via remote access
    • RDC

• Encryption and Verification
  • GPG
  • TrueCrypt
  • S/MIME
  • CACert.org
  • Password Management
    • GNOME Keyring
    • Apple Keychain

• Data Compression
  • Applications
    • ARK
  • Formats
    • tgz, bz2, zip, 7z, rar, ace

• Multimedia
  • MP3
  • DVD
    • LinDVD
  • RealPlayer
  • QuickTime
  • Flash
  • PDF
  • iPod
  • Icecast

• Web service tools
  • Development
    • PHP
    • Perl
    • Python
    • Java

• • Content management
    • DruPal

• Databases
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySql
  • Firebird
  • OpenOffice.org
• Data Migration
  • Database
    • from Access
    • from SQL Server

• (Jorge Castro) Development and Team Management
  • bzr
  • subversion
  • Trac

• Market specific applications
  • Educational
  • Inventory/BOM
  • Accounting
  • Medical
  • Retail/POS

If this is an development platform what else whould you need? Does this even belong in the discussion of a back office solution? Can the back office application suite be completely agnostic towards the desktop?
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