Starting to Blog about technology

I have been working in the technology field since 1983. The last 7 of these 27 years has been like the first 7, exciting; the time spent learning and leveraging all that's new and available in the Open Source world. At the end of 2009 I made a decision to write about the available technologies and how I have leveraged these tools to support business process' for various enterprises; schools, Government entities and commercial organizations.

My approach will be to address both the executive viewers of this newsletter who may need guidance in how to leverage these tools and the consequential impact on the bottom line and the techies that may be interested in practical how to's. My knowledge of FOSS tools is fairly wide and diverse and include:

• Asterisk PBX
• SugarCRM
• Pentaho BI
• Drupal CMS
• Sendmail
• Request Tracker (RT) trouble ticketing
• OpenVPN
• OpenOffice
• MySql
• PostgreSQL
• Apache
• Squid Proxy Server
• Qemu Virtual Computing
• Various programing languages (Perl, PHP, Java, Shell scripting)
• Gimp
• Nagios
• Freemind - a mind mapping tool that is the best tool I have used to organize my thoughts and develop an action plan.
  

and several other tools from the linux OS that I have used to support various platforms inhouse and those of my clients from various outsourced sysadmin projects.

With this introduction out of the way I will tease my first project - the Asterisk PBX. I have used this application to implement a call center platform for a large travel agency consisting of 23 offices located in 5 countries. This has been an on going project that has allowed the agency to leverage voip technologies to significantly enhance the efficiency of their agents as well as improve customer service. Part I of this series will discuss the objectives and strategy employed leading to this deployment - the exec piece of this post - and will be delivered this month.