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.
Are you providing a support contract long term? Are you backed by multiple people in case you’re away and their business is down? I say this more figuratively than specifically you, this could also apply to their internal IT guy who wants to do this.
I’d strongly suggest deferring to a local business IT services company, unless you’re an active partner in the business. They should find a company they are comfortable with and trust, then use the products they recommend and are comfortable with.
I work at the business. In the office. Got a role change. This is on me entirely for now. Nothing I can’t back out of. That being said the point is to streamline and to simply the business workflow. It’s all analog and papers scattered and stacked everywhere for over 2 decades.
There are plenty of document management solutions. What is the actual problem you’re trying to solve? Not just “it’s a mess” because I can solve that with a trash can. What are the needs of the users?
Well the entire business has been ran analog for 2 decades. The problems I am trying to solve are the entire business workflow. Intake to outflow. They use Sage50 for accounting, vericlock to integrate into sage for time tracking software. Beyond that gmail for email. Nothing is connected, integrated.
Everything else business wise is up for grabs. The NAS and paperless was to start scanning in papers and mail and organizing it into something that isn’t piles of paperwork and a mess. Photoprism/immich was for hosting all the businesses pictures of projects, portfolio photos.
We need inventory management for tools to supplies. VOIP phone service which was planning to us FreePBX. They pay for a service Ooma but it’s terrible and 30 a month.
The goal is to establish a work flow for a manufacturing business. From scratch.
If you have a Google workspace, use that for IDP.
Sage might have a connector for that, then when looking for anything to run or saas. Check if they have any IDP connectors, openID or SAML.
Also, why not start scanning all your stuff into your Google workspace, make shared drives for teams/groups of users.
Unless the company is going bankrupt, 30 USD per month is nothing to a business. That is also easily what a business would be willing to pay for a managed open source solution.
I think you’re seriously underestimating the size of this job. This is the work of 4-5 people over several weeks to even upwards of a month. PBX alone is a real PITA to get setup and to manage. Then you actually have to train your people on how to use the infrastructure you just setup for them.
Like you said, they’ve been operating one way for two decades and now you’re completely uprooting that on top of having to setup and manage everything.
You’re underestimating this.
Thank you for the feedback. This seems to be the general consensus. What tech stacks would be good given the circumstances I’m now finding myself in. Personally I dislike Google and all that. But this is business. People need to survive and eat.
You’re going to have to prioritise.
Find changes that:
Save a decent amount of money Are low risk Don’t take too long to do Can be easily backed-out of
You could do something like nextcloud to solve a lot of issues, but I’d still hesitate to recommend on-prem hardware and managing hardware yourself. It really comes down to the business tolerance for outages though, maybe the computers being down for a day or two doesn’t matter.