Thoughts and ideas on people and technology.
July 22, 2024
youtubeDOTcomSLASHwatch?v=M-BinDlevbI
Even if you don’t consider yourself a “technology person” you’ve probably experienced “cloud” outages. We’ve had some large ones in the news recently; CDK Global last month (that was the car dealership one), Crowdstrike last week, and AWS seemingly always (they have so many they’ve become genericized and a meme).
Maybe you’re tired of dealing with these sorts of outages, or maybe you don’t like the idea of AI in everything. (I wrote a bit about this in “Is It Time for Linux on the Desktop?”.) There are options for your office, most of which are free, though they do come with some trade-offs.
The biggest is that you’ll be trading some of your OpEx for CapEx. Larger organizations probably won’t care as much as they’ll have plenty of both already, but if your technology budget is only a few thousand dollars a year it might be a large shift to go from spending a predictable, smaller amount monthly to larger amounts every few years.
The other is that you’ll need dedicated I.T. support and training. Again, if you’re a larger org you probably already have this. Not all of the software and systems I’m about to show you are as simple to set up as M365 or Google Workspace, and most of them don’t come with any automated maintenance.
Let’s start with a productivity suite (or office suite), since we’re already using one! The slides for this video were made in Impress, which is part of the LibreOffice suite. LibreOffice is open source and free, which means no subscription fees! Yay!
LibreOffice also includes Writer, a word processor, and Calc, a spreadsheet editor. As you can see, they’re quite similar to their Microsoft counterparts, but there are enough differences that your office will experience some productivity loss while your staff learn the differences.
You may have noticed that the task bar along the bottom doesn’t look like Windows. That’s because it isn’t! This computer is running Linux Mint, an operating system that, like LibreOffice, is open source and free. It also has the advantage of being very light; this demo is running on the equivalent of a 15 year old computer, so no need to buy $1000+ laptops just for office tasks. Using it is very similar to using Windows; there’s a bar along the bottom with a clock and icons on the right, running programs and shortcuts on the left, and a menu with power, settings, and installed programs. There’s also a file browser with all the usual folders.
Speaking of files, you may find yourself missing something like OneDrive or Google Drive. There are several open source and free alternatives for that too! This demo is using Nextcloud, and I use it for my business as well. It works very similar to OneDrive; I have my folders on this computer synced as well as access to shared folders.
Central file storage will be one of the new sources of CapEx. You’ll need a server of some kind for things like Nextcloud, as well as external backups. It doesn’t need to be a giant $20,000 rackmount unit; for most small offices something like a Start9 server or Intel NUC mini-computer with some USB drives will do great for $1,000 to $2,000 every 5 years or so. These servers can also do lots of other things we won’t cover today.
Next up is email. I recommend Thunderbird; it’s open source and free, and made by the same people as the Firefox web browser. It does email, contacts, calendar, and tasks, and can do chat, but I have a different recommendation for chat. Email service is one of the things we have to compromise on in our “cloud-free” plan and use a third party service for. Business-grade email service will cost anywhere from $15-$150/year/user depending on usage volume, features, and security threat models.
Last is chat and conferencing. This is another item we’ll make some compromises on. You’ll still be joining meetings on Zoom, Teams, WebEx, etc that others invite you to, but you can set up your own internal communications system without using any of those. Signal and Telegram are reasonably trusted third parties outside the “giant evil corporation” spheres, or if you have a server, SimpleX and Matrix are options. For demo purposes I have a Matrix system set up. You can do direct messaging, groups, and audio and video calls. Sending media and files are also supported.
This wasn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, so I’ve skipped over a few items (document signing, bookkeeping, and payment systems got cut from this demo), but the idea was to show you some of what an alternative office setup could look like. If any of this sounds interesting to you, reach out for a consultation. You can find us at scalebright.ca.
©2024 ScaleBright Solutions Copyright All Right Reserved.