[Scottish] how would an IT turkey vote for Christmas?

[Gavin Henry]

On Sunday 24 Jul 2005 15:43, Will Partain wrote:
> (Something a bit different -- Scottish/Linux connection included...)
>
> Here's a question I've been wondering about... A small business/org
> has a need for some pretty standard "intranet" IT things -- some
> subset of: e-mail, (internal) mailing lists, a place to stash (shared)
> documents, a wiki, some (internal) blogs, a way to manage a common
> pool of contacts/addresses, a Subversion server, "groupware" (almost
> always meaning "a way to schedule meetings"), an issue tracker, and
> perhaps something extra for "project management".  Backups and data
> "security" for all of that. These don't vary from one company to
> another, not really.
>
> What if you're a company and you want to *buy* the above?  You don't
> want a server, you don't want an IT guy, you just want a Web panel
> where you can tick "give us an issue tracker", and that's that.
> Employees plug in their laptop, aim a web browser and/or VPN-thingy,
> and it just works.
>
> An extreme solution I've seen mentioned is "websourcing", where you
> use an assemblage of web apps to achieve the above: gmail for mail,
> Yahoo! groups for mailing lists, JotSpot [NB: open for business] for
> wiki-oid things, and so on.  This would seem to rely on a bunch of
> employees each signing up for a plethora of services, and aspects like
> "data security" will just be hard.  For a little reading on this
> option, some blog entries and comments thereon:
>
>   http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/04/websourcing_pro.html
>   http://www.evhead.com/2005/04/running-your-company-on-web-apps.asp
>      http://www.surfarama.com/index.php?p=135
>      http://blog.thylmann.net/2005/04/corporate_web_a.html
>
> At the other end, there are people who will look after a box for you
> (in some co-lo place), "There's a Linux box, do what you like."  This
> doesn't seem to get rid of the need for an IT guy.
>
> There _do_ exist people who solve a part of the problem, the best
> known being e-mail.  They run "your" mail server, handle the
> spam-squashing, often do mailing-lists for you, provide a webmail
> interface, etc., and you never have to think about it.  [Or not: see
> http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad072105.html for a contrary
> experience.]  The problem is, if you need an issue tracker or
> Subversion server -- or any one of the "other" things -- you're back
> to needing an IT guy (or an amateur pretending to be one :-).
>
> But does anyone offer to solve the _whole_ problem?  I'm not even sure
> what query to type into Google :-(

That's a hard problem too solve. When hosting companies do this kind of thing, 
i.e. they provide hosted services, they tend to pick certain things. For 
example you don't see many mod_perl or postgresql hostings, just because they 
aren't that popular.

This is where I think the problem is, demand. It's a lot to invest in setting 
up and configuring all the services you mentioned, and a gamble if you don't 
know/have idea if they will all be used.

>
> I would be most interested in Scottish answers and/or things built on
> a Linux base (if only so I can sleep at night :-).  I'll summarise if
> I get many non-public answers.  Thanks,
>

Just my thoughts as to why it hasn't been done online yet.

Feel free to flame me.

Gavin.

-- 
Kind Regards,

Gavin Henry.
Managing Director.

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