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 a concern for the business is whether other people can help maintain the system. As such don’t go too custom and roll your own. Take things like nextcloud and see if you can fit the requirements by bolting on a few docker services. Keep it simple by using “appliances” where it makes sense (dedicated NAS?).
Yup. I’ve worked in big multinational companies where a local department would roll their own solution (a database and a web page, usually), and then the people that built it moved on or retired and now no one will maintain the thing. A small business has much less resources to deal with this kind of thing.
The closer the stuff is to off the shelf, the better. Reliability and maintainability are paramount and should trump feature set when deciding.
Right now the admin team is 2 people and mostly myself. The labor side is growing as work flows in. The whole reason I took this job is the stake in the company. Its been around for nearly 3 decades very well established and deep roots in the community. The key players are still in the business and industry tied. They have assets and a good crew. But no real internal structure and infrastructure.
Regardless of the team size, I say simplify as much as you can so you can dedicate your resources customizing what makes their business special. You mentioned a PBX system and no infrastructure, this makes me think you talking about Customer Management. It sounds like you’re documenting as you go, fantastic. Maybe loop in a noob time to time to review the documentation or have a Q&A that reifies the docs. Best of luck!