Open source is essential for many of the services at Sapienza University in Rome, one of Europe's largest universities. It is part of most of the software applications used by the university, including those for building management, enrolment, examinations, human resources and the campus wide wireless network. "IT service management is open source," says Giuseppe Arrabito, IT system architect at the Sapienza's IT department.
Dr Arrabito talked about the university's use of open source solutions at the Open Source System Management Conference, which took place last week Friday in the Italian city of Bozen.
Sapienza uses open source to manage its IT services across 63 departments and 11 faculties, assisting 149,690 students, 5,704 professors and 4,800 administrators and technicians. It is used for web portals, web applications, mobile apps, enterprise resource management and our data warehouse. The IT department provides a total of 34 different IT services. Another 18 are focused on backup and security. The IT department manages 300 servers.
The university uses the Linux operating system for many of these services. Other well-known solutions are the Apache webserver and the Apache Tomcat Java application server. The IT department manages many of the university's database by using MySQL. Other well-known open source applications include network monitoring tools Nagios and Cacti, resource management system GLPI and content management systems Drupal and Wordpress.
At the conference in Bozen, Arrabito detailed the university's use of OTRS (Open Technology, Real Service, or Open source Ticket Request System). It is used for the IT help desk, reporting and resolving incidents and to manage PC configurations. "It enabled us to centralise support and assistance to students, teachers and staff. It increased the value and the quality of our services."
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Italy's public administrations are required to make free and open source software a primary choice, following a change in its 'Digital Public Administration Act' in 2012. The university's IT architect recently became one of the members of the government working group that is defining the guidelines and procedures for the adoption of this kind of software. "This law can have big consequences. We're facing many questions, including the transfer of ownership, increasing freedoms for public administration and reducing the risk of IT vendor lock-in."
More information:
Presentation by Giuseppe Arrabito (PDF)
Open Source System Management Conference 2013 website
GLPI Information Resource-Manager
Open Source Ticket Request System