In the land of all the self hosted solutions. What are your best practices / options for business and general admin tasks?
So far we are thinking of setting up a NAS, Paperlessngx for document scanning, FreePBX for phone system, they have accounting software and employee time tracking software. Planning to use nextcloud, running on Proxmox including backups to NAS, with tailscale for 2 people to get in from outside, photoprism for photo storage, portainer.
The goal is a simple, clean, hands off, ways to cut down, centralize the general business work flow. This is a from scratch build and start. All options welcome, the point is to explore ideas. Full production environment for a small business. 1 or 2 office people, 1 to 10 employees. Using a gaming rig mid high end specs which is way overkill for this setup but it might grow depending on this post.
I am looking to FOSS-ify a local business. It’s a service based business, that also does manufacturing which is growing rapidly to overtake the service side it seems this is their goal anyhow.
This is our time to shine! To show how far we have come and what we can now do! An exciting project.
I think the thing with self hosting is that it’s a hobby, and when it goes wrong, it’s part of the hobby to figure it out. But in terms of business, then it becomes a risk. By all means try and use FOSS to improve solutions. I use a self hosted dropbox / file delivery to clients as it can saturate my 1Gbps fibre which is faster than most cloud file shares, but only because if it goes wrong one day, it’s a 2 min job to use a cloud solution instead (temporarily) and email clients with the alternative solution. But I would never build something up that only ever worked via one system.
Don’t just have data backups, have service backups. And in that regard, you may decide it’s just easier to do as others have said and use enterprise solutions from the start.
If using a self hosted Office suite, have all files duped into a single Google Drive account for example. That way you’re only paying for one Google account and have an emergency backup solution in place. EDIT: I’ve just recently degoogled and use Infomaniak in Europe for my office suite backup as its free for the 1st user. Experimenting with other non-Google/Microsoft solutions might be part of your journey.
You may decide the savings aren’t worth the effort in what you’re trying to achieve. EDIT: but I want to add that this is all part of the fun of what we do: thinking outside the box!
I don’t see anyone talking about the human side so I’ll ask - what is the appetite for change? I can see you yourself are motivated and that’s great. How do you feel the attitude is with the others there? Migrating a company that’s been working analogue for decades sounds like a big change programme regardless of the tech choices you ultimately make. This sounds like process change as well as technology change and that requires using another set of skills to wrangle the people.
I would advise to pick a small area first that’s causing the most pain but also very amenable to common tech most people are already familiar with and is only a small change to existing processes. Get an early visible success.
The photo management might be a good start as we all are used to these apps on our phones and the tech is mature and easy to find in FOSS.
Everyone loves Immich though it has some big warnings on its github page about its own maturity. Maybe something simpler: just file/photo synching and a shared gallery? It can always be upgraded in future. Syncthing is solid, some kind of NAS and one of the older/mature galleries running on top. Get your backup process nailed down and run a real recovery process before too many photos are at stake.
Anyway it sounds exciting and kudos to you for looking to FOSS. Good luck!
Infrastructure is also easier to change. A TrueNAS local server with external backup using Borg should be a no brainer for users. You could also setup Syncthing to get users something close to OneDrive.
A gaming rig is a waste of money because you don’t need a fast gpu on a such a server. You want a boring server box and even better one with built-in “ilo” remote management.
FreeIPA and Keycloak will give you directory management (LDAP and Kerberos), identity management, and single-sign on (OIDC and SAML) which if all your computers are running Linux as well, will give you centralized management of users.
You can then set other FOSS business management/productivity applications like NextCloud, Oodoo, Seafile, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, CryptPad, etc. To use Keycloak as its authentication mechanism.
A lot of this will depend on what kind of work the business does.
You’ll also want to look into log management and SEIM for security monitoring, Wazuh, Graylog, and others. This is especially true if the business has any data compliancy responsibilities in the country this is in.
I haven’t tried it, but onlyoffice docspace looks like an option. It’ has hosted and self hosted options.
https://www.onlyoffice.com/docspace-enterprise.aspx
Edit: onlyoffice workspace might be a better fit if the company has the funds.
Is there a reason you aren’t using standard enterprise stuff?
I think you will quickly find that a lot of those pieces of software aren’t scalable
If the business grows tenfold, it’s still only 120 people. They can’t handle that in a gaming rig?
Depends on the workload, really. 120 users using small services? probably. 120 users sharing large files or bandwidth heavy stuff? Doubt it. Also a lot of enterprise hardware is about reliability. Multiple PSUs, NICs, more robust hardware for constant load/network traffic, etc.
Sure, a gaming rig can handle it until it can’t. Another question is what happens when the box crashes? Is the business down until a new PC is built and restored from backups?
A small business can probably afford two PCs, but scaling up and up eventually becomes a lot of trouble and space.