The IT department at Forem, regional centres for employment and training in the Walloon region of Belgium, finds itself increasingly turning to open source solutions. "It helps when budgets are tight, and also avoids lengthy procurement procedures, allowing us to offer services quickly."
According to Bernard Defrenne, IT manager at the employment agency, open source allows rapid development. "A virtual server for a new application is quickly up and running, and at low costs", he explained this week in an email.
The Forem employment agency has no policy that underpins its use of this type of software. Staff at the IT department simply prefer to use such tools. "My IT developers are passionate about open source, and we give them the opportunity to install, test and use these tools. In return it brings us faster new services at lower costs."
Moreover, in the 56 centres in the region, trainings are available on open source solutions and proprietary alternatives to both clients and staff. The centre for instance can show how to use a proprietary office suite, but then will also teach to use Open Office, an open source suite of office productivity tools. "We won't replace one or the other, but offer trainings on both."
Similarly, it will teach users how to work with Gimp, open source photo manipulation software, as well as explain the use of a similar, yet proprietary application.
Expanding catalogue
"We will not migrate completely to open source. But every now and then we'll replace proprietary tools in order to reduce costs. Recently we started using Xmind, a mind mapping tool, and at the same time phased-out a proprietary application."
The centres already use many open source applications, both on desktop PCs and in the IT infrastructure. Examples include Firefox, VLC, and PDF Creator on the desktops. On its servers Forem uses for instance Bacula, Squid, Nagios, Asteriks, Joomla, Moodle, Linux and MySQL.
Moving to open source is not difficult, writes Defrenne. "Far from it, Open source tools offer a great way to expand the catalogue of IT services."
Forem's IT manager Defrenne presented on the centre's use of open source at the 'Open the Source' conference that took place in Gembloux, on 17 March.
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