In the land of all the self hosted solutions. What are your best practices / options for business and general admin tasks?
So far we are thinking of setting up a NAS, Paperlessngx for document scanning, FreePBX for phone system, they have accounting software and employee time tracking software. Planning to use nextcloud, running on Proxmox including backups to NAS, with tailscale for 2 people to get in from outside, photoprism for photo storage, portainer.
The goal is a simple, clean, hands off, ways to cut down, centralize the general business work flow. This is a from scratch build and start. All options welcome, the point is to explore ideas. Full production environment for a small business. 1 or 2 office people, 1 to 10 employees. Using a gaming rig mid high end specs which is way overkill for this setup but it might grow depending on this post.
I am looking to FOSS-ify a local business. It’s a service based business, that also does manufacturing which is growing rapidly to overtake the service side it seems this is their goal anyhow.
This is our time to shine! To show how far we have come and what we can now do! An exciting project.
I don’t see anyone talking about the human side so I’ll ask - what is the appetite for change? I can see you yourself are motivated and that’s great. How do you feel the attitude is with the others there? Migrating a company that’s been working analogue for decades sounds like a big change programme regardless of the tech choices you ultimately make. This sounds like process change as well as technology change and that requires using another set of skills to wrangle the people.
I would advise to pick a small area first that’s causing the most pain but also very amenable to common tech most people are already familiar with and is only a small change to existing processes. Get an early visible success.
The photo management might be a good start as we all are used to these apps on our phones and the tech is mature and easy to find in FOSS.
Everyone loves Immich though it has some big warnings on its github page about its own maturity. Maybe something simpler: just file/photo synching and a shared gallery? It can always be upgraded in future. Syncthing is solid, some kind of NAS and one of the older/mature galleries running on top. Get your backup process nailed down and run a real recovery process before too many photos are at stake.
Anyway it sounds exciting and kudos to you for looking to FOSS. Good luck!
Infrastructure is also easier to change. A TrueNAS local server with external backup using Borg should be a no brainer for users. You could also setup Syncthing to get users something close to OneDrive.