Comment on Ideal Business Stack?
OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml 1 day agoNoted. 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.
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.
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.
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.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 day 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.