Off the shelf software Versus inhouse development

Being in this very stormy market I have heard people talking about where to cut costs but keep things running. The two things I hear the most are cut jobs and purchase off the shelf software. Knowing that the business needs someone to contact for support even OpenSource products would be purchased in that they would buy support contracts for the applications.

This made me think. What is cheaper purchasing software/support from vendors or having your support as a warm body in a seat? Especially a warm body that can read/write many popular programming languages.

If you look at the cost of each product individually:
$4,000 - Enterprise Wiki / Sharepoint (per instance)
$2,000 - Enterprise CMS
$1,700 - Small Databases
$30,000 - Helpdesk software
$100,000 - Reporting software
$200,000 - Email software
$100,000 - Desktop Management software
$100,000 - Backup software

They don't look to astronomical. I am low balling many of these but they are pretty close. You could purchase all of this software and get the warm feelings of (at least the time of purchase) having support. Some like the Email software and Database software will still cost you extra for the support but people tend to forget that. Or you could bring in a couple of good programmer/troubleshooters that have used Open Source products for a while and roll out many of these things with only the cost of 2-3 developers. Granted to get really good, sharp people it is going to cost some money. Especially if you want them to stay around. You could easily get 2 for half the price of what you would have into the purchased software. Between the two keeping 8 applications alive and kicking would be no problem. They would even have time to implement features that you want/need. Imaging that having the ability to get a feature in a product like an Enterprise Email solution!!!

Which that leads me to the biggest thing with bringing on Open Source specialists. They will want to contribute back to the projects. Let them. Encourage them. Drive them.

Fighting battles in the Office

Have you ever spent hours researching, on conference calls, testing and ultimately pulling your hair out just to look at the goal and not caring?

So I have spent the about 100 hours so far doing this. After becoming frustrated I asked a question that made me think to myself "why should I care and put forth so much effort?" I asked why do they want this setup this way? The answer I got was because a couple of users didn't like following the process they would use for any other application. It is mainly working around the security of the system. Which in my mind the CSO should step up and and say "No".

Some Ideas

I have a few personal projects I need to wrap up here quickly so I can start working on my new pet projects. I am taking a look at Joomla for a website that I am setting up for an organization. I have tried many systems and each one seems to be overly complicated or not do what I need it to do. I quickly skimmed over Joomla a few months ago giving 1.5 a try but found that at the time there were no plugins for it. I looked again and it seems that there is more but I am also giving the 1.0.X branch a try. If I can get things going in Joomla it would be great. I really wish a CMS would create an easy to use and easy to manage CMS.

If you know of any good OpenSource CMS solutions please post them in the comments section.

Reoccuring

Looking at the last time I posted it has been a while. I don't want to say that I am going to post again before next year but I would like to.

I have a few presentations to present at the GRLUG so I will probably post more information here about them before and after I post. I am trying to get my googlepages site going to post more static info but someone flagged it before I even put any info on it so I can't access it. I followed Google's procedure but I am still not getting anywhere. I have built some packages that I want to post up on there. The big one is cups for HPUX cups-1.3.2 but no one can get there anyway. :(