The key issue in business strategic planning in relation to ICT is how to deploy open source based systems. Why Open Source?

“The Open Source community attracts very bright, very motivated developers, who although frequently unpaid, are often very disciplined. In addition, these developers are not part of corporate cultures where the best route to large salaries is to move into management, hence some Open Source developers are amongst the most experienced in the industry. In addition all users of Open Source products have access to the source code and debugging tools, and hence often suggest both bug fixes and enhancements as actual changes to the source code. Consequently the quality of software produced by the Open Source community sometimes exceeds that produced by purely commercial organisations.” (QINETIQ2001).

Open Source is reliable, developed to standards, dominant in major business process applications, free to the end user and is constantly improved and updated with a strong end user and development community. Opened source Operating Systems like LINUX dominate the server market as does web server apps like Apache/PHP/MYsql. Open source based software suites are now superseding MS Office thereby obviating ongoing licensing costs and legal compliance. Outlined below are some of the best business OS applications which we can help you deploy.

  • WordPress -State-of-the-art web publishing / design platform – http://wordpress.org/
  • OPencart -Full spec e-commerce system – http://www.opencart.com/
  • Joomla – award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications – http://www.joomla.org/
  • phplist – phplist is an open source contact/news manager – http://www.phplist.com/
  • MyBB – Create your very own MyBulletinBoard forum instantly – http://www.mybboard.net/
  • phpBB – Open Source forum solution, highly customisable – http://www.phpbb.com/
  • Mydbr – web based reporting from mysql databases – http://www.mydbr.com/
  • OpenOffice – A multiplatform and multilingual office suite – http://www.openoffice.org/
  • Google Office – Manage documents, spreadsheets, presentations – http://docs.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=15114