Open Source Guide: Guide for SMEs published
It has been a long, long, long road, but after the evaluation by the Commission, I am happy to announce that we have finally published our guide for small and medium enterprises, designed to help the adoption process of open source and free software.
We have striven to be pragmatic (no vendor-paid research, for example) and practical; two more editions will follow, every 6 months, to allow for updates and new material.
Open Source Directions by geraldinha_1/
The guide (developed in the context of the FLOSSMETRICS and OpenTTT projects) present a set of guidelines and suggestions for the adoption of open source software within SMEs, using a ladder model that will guide companies from the initial selection and adoption of FLOSS within the IT infrastructure up to the creation of suitable business models based on open source software.
The guide is split into an 80 pages introduction to FLOSS and a catalog of 165 applications, selected to fulfill the requests that were gathered in the interviews and audit in the OpenTTT project. The application areas are infrastructural software (ranging from network and system management to security), ERP and CRM applications, groupware, document management, content management systems (CMS), VoIP, graphics/CAD/GIS systems, desktop applications, engineering and manufacturing, vertical business applications and eLearning.
The guide is available at the guide web page ; the two pdfs are 2Mb (“FLOSS Guide“) and 20 Mbytes (“FLOSS Catalog“), so take it into account if you are connected by narrowband or cell phone.
I welcome any suggestion, addition or criticism; I hope that this can become the beginning of a collaborating community centered on helping the use and adoption of OSS in companies. I thank Roberto for the many suggestions and for the use of his blog as a media for future updates and interactions with any welcome contributor. To facilitate conversation on the topic touched by the guide, and in particular those related to open source business model, we are preparing a mailing-list that will be announced soon.
Carlo Daffara, and 
Paolo Corti 12:14 pm on November 28, 2007 Permalink
Carlo and Roberto
this is an invaluable exceptional work!
thank you very much for it, I am looking forward to have some spare time these nights to read both docs, and maybe give you some feedback based on my experience.
Carlo Daffara 4:55 pm on November 28, 2007 Permalink
Dear Paolo,
many thanks for your kind words. Our hope is to be useful to as many companies as possible, and any feedback (and of course any criticism) is welcome.
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