At my current job, I’m the only one doing any sort of programming work. I basically am the “tech solutions” guy and although we do have an IT department. The work we do is bastly different.
So this is a great oportunity for me to present open source software and, while my current company is a deeply entrenched windows user, I have been able to convince colleages and my boss that sometimes straying from it has lots of benefits (specially in the wallet department).
Without further ado, here are the open source projects I managed to implement onto my fully windows company:
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A ubuntu LTS web server: One of the bigger projects I was tasked with was making an internal utilities website. As linux is king in the web world it was fairly easy to get this setup approbed and as an added bonus I got to implement a fairly similar ‘0 downtime’ setup I saw showcased on youtube. Using industry standard tools like docker or git and some good ol’ bash. Here we use pgAdmin to connect to the Postgress server and do basic maintenance tasks.
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Headwind’s mobile device management service: This one I’m fairly proud of, my IT department has 500+ phones to setup each year and all of these were done manually, as they didnt find any provider that didn’t offer a cost-effective solution. With Headwinds model I was able to setup another small test server and showcase it. While the solution aint perfect, I managed to convince my manager that this is something we should go forward with. To be honest, I’m just proud that I saved hours of work for whichever poor interns would have been tasked with manually doing half a thousand phones.
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Mozilla Thunderbird: This one’s one of those quick and easy fixes. New reports only came in through mail, so I setup a client that downloads these to files the other departments use. Here I am sure I can find a way better solution, specially one that doesnt require a different instance per target folder.
While this is an overall short list, progress is progress and I am constanly on the look for replacements for tools I feel forced to use.
For example, Power Automate. I am looking for a solution that lets me export to an exe and has the strong selector tools it’s using. AutoHotKey seems to be a great replacement but it’s still just relying on screen position which doesnt have the portability I need. Pywinauto has great promise but I havent gotten the downtime to re-implement something working on it.
Here’s three:
You’ll notice that I’m being deliberately vague.
All these share the exact scenario that the OP outlines. The organisations involved didn’t know that they were in deep trouble until well after the project instigator departed. No documentation, no updates, no training, handover, nothing beyond a set of credentials.
What can a small organization opting for open source solutions customized by a single person do to safegaurd itself against his/her absence?
Fair question.
What it boils down to is: Become part of the OSS community.
In my experience, there’s no other way, since the alternative is to be automatically part of the Microsoft (or Apple) community.
In other words, you need to make the investment into the implementation. As I’ve said elsewhere, license costs are insignificant.
The community is where you get help, where you find others with the same issues. You can pay the likes of Canonical and Redhat, but I’ve never been impressed by either.
Ultimately any solution requires support, just like any other tool. You just need to make it explicit, rather than assumed.
One thing that Microsoft does to ensure that you have support infrastructure is to continually break backwards compatibility in subtle ways that require you to open your wallet and pay for support.
OSS will likely run for years without adult supervision, but that doesn’t mean it can continue to work without requiring support from time to time. If you don’t prepare for this, you’re going to be very unhappy.