Comment on Ideal Business Stack?
catloaf@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
For business? What’s the value to the business over services like Office 365?
Personally, unless there’s a very good reason for it, I strongly recommend against this. I used to work for a company that did business IT, and there were far too many times we got called in to take over for a guy that did it himself and got in over his head, left the company, or just plain died, and it ended up costing the company much more in the long run.
OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
Noted. What are some closed source solutions?
The value they seek is to privatize their own data, run their own software free of subscription services and pricing, being bound by all the usual constraints of big corporations. Its a small business.
catloaf@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
The value in those products is that it takes much less management, brings much greater reliability, and support teams if you have issues. If your dinky NAS shits the bed, the company’s data is gone, the company is kaput, you are all out of a job.
Of course there is a middle ground. I know there are plenty of open-source hosted products. They’re still subscriptions, but that monthly expense probably comes out cheaper than the time and effort building and maintaining your custom systems.
If you still really want to host it yourself, make sure you run through your disaster and recovery scenarios. You will have to have a 3-2-1 backup system. And remember because shit will go wrong, two is one, and one is none. That includes you personally, in the event you get hit by a
buslottery.I would recommend an actual Dell tower server with idrac for remote management, and with prosupport for when something blows up (sometimes literally, I had one PSU go bang on a server under my desk at one point). Fill it with enough disks for redundancy and data growth for the next few years, but leaving room for expansion. Put your favorite hypervisor on it, set up some vms or containers to run those services, test backups, and document everything so that a semi-trained monkey can follow it.
But don’t host your own email. Getting each individual email server to not consider you spam is a Sisyphean task.
Shadow@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
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’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.
OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 20 hours ago
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.
catloaf@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
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?
Shadow@lemmy.ca 19 hours ago
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.