Taking the Open Source Pill

Afew months ago, we had to decide on a NAS solution for our company. In order to educate myself more on the topic of network storage, I started searching the Internet and it was not too long before I stumbled upon FreeNAS (www.freenas.org) — a FreeBSD based Open Source storage platform. As I read more about it, the usual concerns about deploying Open Source for mission critical enterprise apps came to fore — will the application work as promised; will it be easy to install and maintain; where will we find support when we may need it the most?

After some more research, I discovered that FreeNAS had many successful installations across SMEs, had a vibrant support community and was feature rich to address most of our current and perceived future needs. We ordered a custom configured storage box from our preferred hardware vendor and decided to try out FreeNAS for our enterprise storage and backup needs. Installation was a breeze and I was able to configure and have a fully functional NAS up and running in a matter of a few hours with complete compatibility across Windows, Linux and Mac clients.

The FreeNAS experiment further reinforced my belief in Open Source software as a viable option for the enterprise and I am glad to share here some our experiences:

1. pfSense Firewall: A robust open source firewall distro that has given us hassle free service over the years. Its easy to use GUI interface and rich feature set including rule based statefull firewall, transparent proxy, proxy filter and bandwidth limiting, have been immensely useful and we have never had to look beyond pfSense for our firewall needs.

2. SugarCRM: After having worked extensively with more than three major proprietary CRM solutions, the features and functionality offered by SugarCRM community edition came to me as a pleasant surprise. We now use it to manage our sales and customer support processes. To be fair though, customization in SugarCRM is a specialized skill and many features such as interactive dashboards, reporting and integration with popular mail or calendar tools are either primitive or need investment in SugarCRM's commercial version or third party tools. However, SugarCRM does address our basic customer relationship management needs.

3. Alfresco Enterprise-wide Document Management: As an analysis and research company, a well managed, user access based, document repository is critical for us. Alfresco fills that need and its browser based management interface, version control and support for CIFS and WebDAV aware network shares make collaborative document management across teams a breeze.

SMEs stand to benefit immensly from enterprise-grade open source applications, but there are a few caveats. While the software license itself in most cases may be free, the deployment and implementation is not. Seek advice from experienced consultants or build capability in-house to manage and maintain open source deployments. Make sure that the application is widely supported. Check out the project website, read reviews, browse through discussions on support forums. If something is working well for you, don't try to fix it. Stay clear of beta versions and upgrade from an existing version only when you are certain that the features being offered are essential.