Open Plan IT solutions
Bit of a techie post this one, picked up off the Circuit Riders mailing list, an offering from a VCS friendly IT support company, I'll let them explain it themselves:
"Hi. My name is Pete Boyd, I'm new to this list so I wanted to introduce myself by describing my organisation, Open Plan IT, and what we do.
I and my colleague Matt Fawcett have been doing computer support in Manchester and elsewhere in the UK for 12 years for various environmental, social and political change organisations. We're now also beginning to operate in Brighton and around the South East of England.
We try to be a one-stop-shop of IT services, offering advice, hardware, software support, web sites, networks, etc. We advocate the use of free and open source software, both on principle and for practical reasons.
In order to better scale what we do, we do everything consistently and identically across all organisations. In order to be transparent, and in order to give back in the spirit of the free software which we so often use, we publish details of everything we do. We've developed various tools, working practices and documentation which I'll introduce here.
Our web site is at http://openplanit.co.uk but most of our documentation is at the legacy location of my personal web site http://thegoldenear.org (this will change soon).
The mainstay of the way we work is our Roaming Computing System (RCS), the 'Windows Edition' of which is currently at version 3.6 [1]. (We haven't developed the 'Linux Edition' yet). Within the framework of the RCS falls everything else we've developed.
Our Roaming Computing System is a complete, organisation-wide, computing system, comprising a Debian GNU/Linux server running a Windows domain and email [2]; Windows XP workstations [3]; and a pfSense firewall [4]. We set this system up within each organisation.
The Windows workstations run a suite of free software and freeware [1] that we've chosen and which we deploy automatically from the server using WPKG. They're initially setup by creating a single template workstation then imaging the rest using CloneZilla. There are no costs associated with any of the software we provide (the second-user workstations come with a Windows XP Pro product key).
The pfSense firewall uses OpenVPN to allow us to do most of our administration remotely, and staff to work remotely using dedicated laptops running Windows XP or Ubuntu.
All of this is periodically updated, often around the time of a 'pulse' of major updates of the most-used applications - OpenOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird.
The server is backed up nightly to USB-attached Freecom Toughdrives [5].
Security is paramount. We retain administrative rights over everything; people login to the Windows domain using Limited user accounts and they don't get any administrator or root passwords. We banish or discourage the use of laptops that we don't control the software on from people's intranets.
In fits and starts we innovate, not just updating the existing software but adding new software applications to the workstations and services to the server, but we could be doing more of this. There's still a lot we don't do that we and our clients would benefit from, that we intend to learn, for example groupware, telephony maybe, concurrent versioning for users.
We offer comprehensive support contracts to organisations at a grant-friendly fixed cost. The fixed support rate means it's in both our own interest and the client's interest that the system remain as stable as possible.
We offer the fixed support rate for both labour and hardware. We supply a suite of identical, second-user, ex-corporate, workstations and the client pays us back over time. As long as clients are using our suite of supported software then the fixed cost for support covers 99% of what they might want to do. We charge an hourly rate for supporting other software applications (in practice predominantly just the occasional Microsoft Office and QuickBooks).
We couldn't offer this kind of fixed support cost at the price we do if we ourselves had to buy each new version of commercial software in order to learn how they work."
All of which sparked off a lot of interest and discussion on the list
