Bryan Fogleman speaker at: Position Your Business for Post Recession Recovery
Position Your Business for Post Recession Recovery - Technology Solutions that Save You Money
Bryan Fogleman will be one of the guest speakers at the small-business round table sessions on Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009 at the Westin Hotel on 6631 West Broad Street, Richmond, VA 23230. The sessions start at 6:00 pm and are Free of Charge. There will be five round table discussions lasting about twenty minutes each. Guests will have the opportunity to select three of the five sessions in one evening before the closing remarks at 8:00 pm.
Bryan will present on "Technology Solutions that Save You Money." The technology topic discussions can range from
- cost effective techniques using Open Source Software,
- security models and best practice policies,
- virtualization & cloud computing techniques solutions
- Voice over IP
to name only a few.
Additional sessions will be conducted in the spring of 2010 if you missed enrollment in this event.
Open Source Software News
Additionally, one can access a recent release from the Department of Defense (DoD) CIO, Mr. David A. Wheeler, about the benefits of Open Source Software solutions and new US Govt. DoD guidelines being released. Below is an excert form his on-line paper in the conclusions section.
"OSS/FS has significant market share in many markets, is often the most reliable software, and in many cases has the best performance. OSS/FS scales, both in problem size and project size. OSS/FS software often has far better security, perhaps due to the possibility of worldwide review. Total cost of ownership for OSS/FS is often far less than proprietary software, especially as the number of platforms increases. These statements are not merely opinions; these effects can be shown quantitatively, using a wide variety of measures. This doesn’t even consider other issues that are hard to measure, such as freedom from control by a single source, freedom from licensing management (with its accompanying risk of audit and litigation), Organizations can transition to OSS/FS in part or in stages, which for many is a far more practical transition approach.
Realizing these potential OSS/FS benefits may require approaching problems in a different way. This might include using thin clients, deploying a solution by adding a feature to an OSS/FS product, and understanding the differences between the proprietary and OSS/FS models. Acquisition processes may need to change to include specifically identifying OSS/FS alternatives, since simply putting out a “request for proposal” may not yield all the viable candidates. OSS/FS products are not the best technical choice in all cases, of course; even organizations which strongly prefer OSS/FS generally have some sort of waiver process for proprietary programs. However, it’s clear that considering OSS/FS alternatives can be beneficial.
Of course, before deploying any program you need to evaluate how well it meets your needs, and some organizations do not know how to evaluate OSS/FS programs. If this describes your circumstance, you may wish to look at the companion articles How to Evaluate OSS/FS Programs and the Generally Recognized as Mature (GRAM) list.
This paper cannot possibly list all the possible OSS/FS programs that may be of interest to you. However, users of Windows who are looking for desktop software often try programs such as OpenOffice.org (OSS/FS office suite), Firefox (OSS/FS web browser), and Thunderbird (OSS/FS mail browser). Projects like The OpenCD project creates CDs that include those (and other) OSS/FS programs for Windows with nice installers and so on. Many OSS/FS programs aren’t available for Windows, though, or do not work as well on Windows. Those interested in trying out GNU/Linux operating system often start with a simple CD that doesn’t touch their hard drive, such as Gnoppix or Knoppix. They then move on to various Linux distributions such as Red Hat (inexpensive Fedora Core or professionally-supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Novell/SuSE, Mandriva (formerly MandrakeSoft), or Ubuntu (nontechnical users may also be interested in pay-per-month distributions like Linspire, while technically knowledgeable users may be interested in distributions like Debian).
OSS/FS options should be carefully considered any time software or computer hardware is needed. Organizations should ensure that their policies encourage, and not discourage, examining OSS/FS approaches when they need software."
The actual paper can be accessed here: http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
The 2009 memorandum is designed to replace the previous 2003 memorandum and is to be released soon at:
http://www.defenselink.mil/cio-nii/policy/memorandums.shtml