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Hello everyone, I am an IT manager at a university and I am looking for Open Source products. I think it will be a great idea if each one of us shares his/her experience on the open source products he/she uses (in his/her school / university). In our case, we use GLPI (as a Helpdesk tool) and Xibo (as a Digital Signage tool) and we are very satisfied with it. Thank you

Link: toonz

Hey all, yet again: We're looking for an email archive / search tool that will integrate with our Exchange 2003 box. We've demoed some units and like the Datacove that we saw, but the initial cost + support averages $9,000 / yr over the life of the unit. I feel that I should be able to do something open source to accomplish the same, for significantly less cost. Details: I would need an application or device that does the following: 1. Email recovery - if an Exchange user deletes an email from their deleted items box, I need to be able to recover it. If users can do their own, bonus. 2. Email search - for attorney cases, we need to be able to search 7+ years of email for a student name or for various teacher names during specified time frames - basically a search feature with "normal" search abilities 3. The ability to get the resulting emails from the search in 2 either printed or emailed in some readable format for use in court, attorney review, etc. Currently our Exchange server is using ~300 GB for email storage going back for the required 7 years, so we're not talking TB of data here. Any ideas? I can't believe this has never been done. As an aside, I'm currently running mail relays that filter emails coming into our district with Ubuntu/Postfix/SpamAssassin (etc) that relay to Exchange - I don't currently do anything with internal to internal email but it would have to be something this email archiver takes into account. Thanks for any suggestions. Damian Bailey

Just read this interesting blog posting about the issues an open source provider had when attempting to tender for a BECTA contract. It shows up a few valid issues with the tendering process that they used. Ian Lynch's take on the BECTA fiasco

Just found this on Slashdot: Technology Review: Open-Source, Multitouch Display http://www.eyebeam.org/files/project/cubit.jpg Looks like it is in its early stages but it could create some interesting possibilities if this technology became cheaper and easier to develop for. It looks like they are selling kits to make these prototype models for between $500 and $1000USD Here is the actual project site: NOR_/D

Link: Wireshark Is 25: The email that started it all and the lessons learned along the way | Sniff free or die I remember being nervous and excited at the time, wondering what the reaction would be. I had spent the previous few months working on a protocol analyzer, which was something I needed at work. There are a couple of things to note: the name wasn’t Wireshark (we changed the name in 2006) and at the time of this email, protocol analyzers were rare, you could even say a precious thing. Back then, if you wanted to see what was happening on your network, command line tools like tcpdump and snoop were available at no cost, but if you wanted a GUI analyzer, you had to pay for a product that might cost the equivalent of a luxury car. I needed an analyzer to do my job, so I ended up writing a simple one and releasing it as open source. As it turned out, other people needed an analyzer too. A couple of days after I sent this email, I received a patch. Then another, and another. This quickly blossomed into a thriving developer community which has kept me busy ever since. In the intervening years, the project and its community have grown beyond any expectation that I could have had. Today, Wireshark is used by people around the world to make their networks fast, reliable, and secure, and educators use it to teach the next generation of security and network engineers about the low-level aspects of networks. What does it take to keep a project successful for so long? It would be nice to be able to say that from the very beginning, there was a grand, clear vision of how everything would evolve and unfold. However, as with any significant endeavor, you have to learn to adapt and apply the resources at hand as effectively as you can. In retrospect, Neils Bohr’s quote “An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” rings especially true in our case. I did manage to learn that in order for an open source project to grow and thrive, you have to ensure that needs are met in the following categories: User support. Living, breathing people make use of your project, and sometimes need assistance. They might be daily power users or novices, and their needs vary. Educator support. Experts and power users can teach others how to get the most out of your project, and need assistance as well. Developer support. The easier you can make it for people to contribute code or otherwise improve the project, the healthier the project and community will be. Attorneys and accountants. Until GitHub and GitLab add “intellectual property law” or “travel reimbursement” buttons, you’re going to need to find outside help for the regulatory, legal, and financial aspects of your project. Infrastructure. You need servers, containers, and services that provide an online presence and allow for collaboration. GitHub or GitLab may or may not be sufficient for this depending on your specific needs. This isn’t quite a Maslow-style hierarchy of needs for open source, but it’s close. The lines between users, educators, and developers can be blurry, but in general, users and educators depend on the output that developers produce, and the project as a whole needs a solid infrastructure in order for everyone to collaborate. It also doesn’t apply uniformly to all projects. For example, a small, single-purpose image processing library might only need infrastructure and developers, and its user community would likely be other developers. A hosting service like GitHub or GitLab would be sufficient for the project’s infrastructure. On the other hand, a large, feature-rich image editing application might have extensive needs in all five categories along with a business model to fund the project. Wireshark falls into the latter group, and needs quite a bit of care and feeding. Until recently, the business model for meeting these needs has been “ask my employer if they’ll host the project,” which worked surprisingly well. My employers (CACE Technology, Riverbed and now Sysdig) provided the resources for Wireshark that go way beyond what GitHub and GitLab can offer, such as SharkFest, a conference dedicated to protocol analysis. In recent years, it became clear that the project would best meet its needs by standing on its own, and with the help of Sysdig, we moved the project to the Wireshark Foundation earlier this year so that the project can continue to grow and serve its community. 25 years ago when I sent that email, I never thought I would be blogging about the project today! If you’ve ever thought about starting an open source project, don’t hesitate to do so. Supporting and managing Wireshark has given me a wonderful career, and opportunities to meet and work with brilliant, inspiring people. If I had to distill everything I’ve learned down to a couple of pieces of advice, it would be this: The community has valuable insights to share. Let them do that. Don’t be afraid to start something new. You never know where it might take you 25 years from now. Finally, I can’t thank you all enough for using and contributing to Wireshark over the years. I can’t wait to see what the future brings. Cheers!

Link: Storyboarder - The best and easiest way to storyboard

15 essential open source tools for Windows admins | Open Source Software - InfoWorld Found this and it looked useful, had no heard of some of them.

I have been asked to summarise the pros and cons in connection with the choices between Microsoft Office Vs OpenOffice. I have a broad idea of what needs to be said. However I would like to open a discussion here and have a single place to go to when the time comes to give the summary to SLT. There are obvious points of contention: For me the lack of compliance with Group Policy is a major concern [Default save location/visibility of C:/Visibility of files and folders on the HDD] However I am sure that functionality and compatibility will be the prime mover. We are looking at making major savings by reducing our commitment to Microsoft licensing. So what are your experiences? What happens when there are no direct equivalents? [Word has a close match in OpenOffice, but a database solution match is not as close, neither is an Outlook [connecting to Exchange Server and downloading all calendars, shared calendars, scheduled events, for Exchange will still exist after the move to OpenSource solutions] In summary then: What do you see as: The benefits of this plan? How do you see the problems being manifest? Discuss.... Many thanks.

Hi Guys, Can anyone suggest a good open source monitoring tool that can be integrated to receive alerts from licensed tools like HPOV / Geneos ITRS / BMC / HP OVO? I'm trying to help out a friend, their company uses several licensed monitoring tools which are very costly, so im trying to verify if its possible to integrate them into an open source monitoring tool, could be a number or combination of tools working together (front-end, back-end, etc). Someone already suggested Nagios, are their any other that anyone could suggest? thanks.

Has anyone tried this software yet? Lightworks

Hi everybody, I have been exploring some open source software lately and found quite a few to be very useful for some departments in our school. has anyone got any open source software that they can recommend and a quick desciption of what it is? Thank you

Does anyone know of any Open Source projects that does Printer Monitoring on Windows network? Ie. Determine print usage acrossed the network. Doesn't need to have quota ablities but thats always an added bonus

Hello there! Having worked in schools as a technician, I'm painfully aware of how much money they spend on IT licensing -- I've had many a business manager complain directly, so I was always keen to promote OS software as an alternative. Having switched jobs, I now work for a data company, and a project they have is an open source BI tool for schools. It uses the Xporter API to extract data from SIMS (and others) and populates the data into a PostgreSQL DB, which they can then visualise using something like Superset. Ideally this could be used in schools teaching A-Level IT or CS, so that students could work on the project as part of their coursework, and also provide some benefit to the school by giving them free access to their data. From my time working as a school technician, I can only see benefits to this, but I was curious if anyone had any ideas, feedback or can poke any holes in this, or even better, would like to contribute to the project? Ben P.S. http://www.schools.bi

Link: Winamp has announced that it is opening up its source code to enable collaborative development of its legendary player for Windows

Later this year Editshare is going to opensource their Video editing product Lightworks. It can apparently handle HD fotage and can share projects with both Avid and Finalcut Pro. EditShare Announces First Ever Lightworks Open Source Platform What with this and the new VLC Video editor it looks like the open source space may finally end up with some quality easy to use editing software for video which should be great for school budgets everywhere.

Link: GitHub - google/glazier: A tool for automating the installation of the Microsoft Windows operating system on various device platforms

Link: Open-Sourcing Google Earth Enterprise

Just read this blog about a guy being assulted because of his job of refurbishing computers with Linux Blog of helios: Tempers Flare as Recession Creeps into Tech Industry I am sure that it was just one guy having a bad day but it is disturbing to see where people choose to project the blame.