One Point Blog

A recent report published by the Public Sector Forum reveals interesting insight into the adoption and barriers of Open Source in local government.  Full report can be downloaded at http://ukgovoss.org/open-or-closed/.

For further details please contact David Linday at david.lindsay@onepointld.com.

K. L. E. Society’s College of BCA had organised a seminar on Open Source and Embedded Systems at the Digital Vision Laboratory of the Lingaraj College Campus in Belgaum, Karnataka on 28th April 2009.
K. L. E. Society (http://www.klesociety.org) is one of the largest educational societies in Asia with over 205 educational institutions spread throughout and outside India.

On this occasion, Chintan Zaveri, Open Source Consultant at One Point spoke about the need of adopting Open Source within the Indian EDU sector.  The topics covered included:

• History of Open Source Software (OSS)
• Myths and benefits of OSS
• OSS Activity throughout the world
• OSS Adoption Case studies
• The EDU scenario in India
• Why should the students and educators adopt Open Source?

We also took this opportunity to launch Open EDU One, a wide range of Open Source Software services for the educational institutions in India. Our services mainly focus on:

• Improving the institutions’ capability to manage change by improving internal collaboration
• Enhancing the institutions’ brand and visibility, globally
• Reducing IT and other expenditures and encouraging innovation

If you are an EDU in India, please call us on +91 98 603 23774 or email contact@onepointltd.com to find out how One Point can help you achieve any or all of the above mentioned goals.

Attachments:

• Open EDU One flier
• Clipping of the Press Coverage by Deccan Herald, Belgaum, 29th April 2009

The One Point Consulting team has extensive experience of Enterprise Architecture and Integration going back 20 years.  Our team built the Architecture & Integration practice at Andersen putting in place an integration methodology and implementing real-time and batch based integrations using IBM’s MQ Series, MQ Integrator, webMethods, CrossWorlds and Informatica for key blue chip clients. At Carphone Warehouse we led the architecture definition for a strategic platform for CRM/Billing/Order Management and Online channels using a SOA architecture based on the Tibco middleware products BusinessWorks, iProcess and Business Events.

One Point is actively involved in the research and evaluation of Open Source software which we believe can be applied to solve business problems for small and large enterprises. , One Point has recently been taking a closer look at real-time integration and based on our assessment and maturity models  decided to integrate Mule ESB and Alfresco ECM, both of which are the leaders in their respective areas.

The goal of our exercise was to create a Mule service to log into Alfresco using its Web Services and call one of the securely protected Web Services.

For the exercise, we used Alfresco 3 Stable (Community Edition) and Mule standalone 2.2.1. The development was done in Eclipse.

The step-by-step scenario:

1. Read the Alfresco user name and password from the command line.
2. Send the user name and password to the Alfresco Authentication Webservice.
3. Where the login is successful, get the ticket and store it somewhere.
4. Call another Alfresco webservice and inject the ticket into the SOAP security header.

Whereas, the above scenario looks simple, we documented a number of challenges and the specific configurations that helped us accomplish these. For the benefit of the community, we have posted a detailed version of our successful endeavour at the Alfresco Wiki (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Mule_Alfresco_Integration). Have fun!

UK Government has published on 24th Feb a new policy on open source software that will ensure maximum value for money for taxpayers. Policy covers:

1. Open source software: the policy includes 10 actions that will actively help make sure the best possible, best value for money software solutions are put forward for government requirements, be they open source or propriety products.
2. Open standards: the policy contains an explicit reference to open standards, ensuring systems are interoperable and avoiding getting locked in to a particular product where possible.
3. Re-use: the Government will look to re-use what it has already bought, with successful solutions being made available across government.

The new policy reflects changes to both the open source market and the Government’s approach to IT. In setting out the ten actions Government will make sure of a level playing field for Open Source Software, and encourage the use of Open Standards and re-use of software the Government has already paid for. The new policy can be found at http://www.cio.gov.uk/transformational_government/open_source/index.asp.

One Point welcomes this and will actively provide our feedback and suggestions to help the effective implementation of this policy. #ukgovOSS