TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data is automatically encrypted or decrypted right before it is loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc).

Files can be copied to and from a mounted TrueCrypt volume just like they are copied to/from any normal disk (for example, by simple drag-and-drop operations). Files are automatically being decrypted on the fly (in memory/RAM) while they are being read or copied from an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. Similarly, files that are being written or copied to the TrueCrypt volume are automatically being encrypted on the fly (right before they are written to the disk) in RAM. Note that this does not mean that the whole file that is to be encrypted/decrypted must be stored in RAM before it can be encrypted/decrypted. There are no extra memory (RAM) requirements for TrueCrypt.

Practical Use

Some of the above technical description might sound too complex to be used by a normal (non-technical) computer user. However, in reality TrueCrypt is very simple to use. Lets say you have some important and confidential files such as MS Word documents, Powerpoint presentations, PDF documents, and your emails.  You want to have all of this data on your computer or USB drive, however only YOU should be able to read it even if someone else has physical access to the system.

TrueCrypt Volume

After installing TrueCrypt on your computer, you need to create a volume. A volume is nothing but a logical disk partition that will contain all your secured and encrypted data. This volume will reside as a normal file on your computer. You can give it any name, e.g. “My Encrypted Data”. While you create your volume you will be asked to mention the volume location, encryption algorithm (AES, Twofish, etc), volume size, and the volume password.

Mount Volume

Once you have created a volume, you can then mount it on your computer as a normal drive and use it just like you would use your C: or D: . The benefit you get here is just before the data is written to the mounted drive it is encrypted and likewise decrypted when data is read from it. When the drive is unmounted, the volume resides on your computer like a regular data file with some encrypted binary text that no one can understand. The volume container can be treated as a regular file and can be copied on USB or transferred to another computer where it can be mounted to a drive again using TrueCrypt, thereby giving you portability with your secured data.

TrueCrypt is an open source application and is FREE. If you are skeptical about using a freebie application for protecting your confidential data, think again. Some of the best brains in the realm of security (Bruce Schneier, Joanna Rutkowska) have given it a serious look in terms of breaking its security. Like every security system hackers will continuously try to break it while the application will evolve to thwart these attacks. Having said that, TrueCrypt is quite an impressive tool to achieve security and confidentiality of your important data without having to pay for commercial products which pretty much do the same thing.

SugarCRM Dashboard

Based on PHP and MySql, SugarCRM provides all the advanced features available in any commercial CRM software. There are four main entities in the SugarCRM system.

Account: An account is any customer organization/company that you are or will do business with.

Contact: Contacts are people that you are or will be communicating with. Contacts can be independent or be associated with your accounts.

Opportunities: This represents any sales or commercial prospect you might have with an account.

Lead: A lead is a potential prospect that you want to follow but has not yet become a Contact or Account.

Initially your customer will be entered as a Lead. Once the lead develops, it can be converted into Contact or an Account. An Account can have multiple Contacts and Opportunities.  There is also a notion of Activity such as Meeting, Email, Call, and Task that can be associated with either of the entities described above (Lead, Contact, Account, and Opportunity).  Hence while viewing an Account you can get a good understanding of all the contacts & opportunities associated with it along with the history of activities such as meetings and follow-up calls actioned or planned with that account.

To add to the functionality, SugarCRM allows you to create marketing campaigns such as email or newsletter campaigns. All leads, accounts, and opportunities can be linked with a particular campaign allowing you to measure the ROI of that marketing campaign. If you are interested in the domain of Customer Service, SugarCRM also allows you to create and track issues (cases) and bugs. These issues and bugs can also be linked to Accounts giving you a complete 360 view into you customer history.

The community (free) edition of the software provides all the above functionality along with some basic reporting. However, the commercial version offers some additional features and a more advanced reporting. Additionally, the SugarExchange platform offers a wide array of third-party created modules further increasing the value-add of SugarCRM

JBoss jBPM is a JBoss Enterprise Framework that delivers workflow, business process management (BPM), and process orchestration in a scalable and flexible product footprint. JBoss jBPM reduces development time to automate and integrate business processes leveraging IT. It provides the tools and process execution engine to integrate services deployed in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and automate workflows in Java and Web applications to reduce business process error, speed process execution, and enhance business performance.

JBoss jBPM enables IT flexibility by supporting multiple-process languages with the same scalable process engine platform. It’s pluggable architecture is extensible and customizable on every level: within the process engine, for each process definition, and every corresponding process instance. It seamlessly integrates with JBoss Seam which is an application framework for simplifying and unifying the EJB and Java Server Faces (JSF) component models. JBoss jBPM provides a process-oriented programming model (jPDL) that blends the best of both Java and declarative programming techniques.

Intalio is an open source business process platform built around the standards-based Eclipse STP BPMN modeler and Apache ODE BPEL engine, both originally contributed by Intalio. Intalio Enterprise provides all the components required for the design, deployment, and management of the most complex business processes which includes

• BRE
• BAM
• Porta
• ESB
• ECM

Intalio is available in several editions but what we’re most interested in is Intalio’s free community edition. This edition is made of two components, Intalio Designer and Intalio Server. Intalio Designer allows one to model  the business level processes for the model to be eventually deployed to Intalio Server. Intalio Designer is the only tool currently available on the market that allows any BPMN model to be turned into fully executable BPEL processes without having to write any code. Intalio Server is a high-performance process engine that can support the most complex business processes, deployed within mission-critical environments.

ProcessMaker is an open source business process management (BPM) and workflow software designed for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). It is a user friendly solution to manage workflow effectively and efficiently. Business users and process experts with no programming experience can design and run workflows, increase transparency, and radically reduce paperwork, automate processes across systems, including human resources, finance, and operations.

With ProcessMaker you can easily create workflow maps, design custom forms, extract data from external data sources and many more key features to optimize workflow management and business operations.

One key advantage of ProcessMaker is the online library which provides many process templates for you to download and begin editing. Learning curve can also be reduced since you’re starting from one which is already readily built and tested.

CuteFlow is a web-based open source document circulation and workflow system. Users are able to define “documents” which are send step by step to every station/user in a list.
It’s an electronic way for doing (i.e. internal) document circulations. A document can be assembled from input fields of different types. The fields can be filled with values by the receiver of the document directly in the users E-Mail-Client. After a completed circulation you will have a completely filled document. Also attachments to the document are possible (i.e. for illustration material). All operations like starting a workflow, tracking, workflow-definition or status observation can be done within a comfortable and easy to use web interface.

ActiveVOS is a standards-based visual orchestration system. ActiveVOS revolutionizes the work of automating business processes by making it easier than ever before to create BPM applications that radically improve business results. ActiveVOS also overcomes the cost barrier that has until now delayed many organizations’ BPM efforts.

ActiveVOS system consists of the ActiveVOS Designer and the ActiveVOS Server. ActiveVOS Designer is a rich productivity tool that incorporates the BPMN, BPEL and BPEL4People open standards and a set of advanced wizards that make easy it to create business process models and orchestrations quickly. ActiveVOS Server easily scales to meet the needs of enterprises of any size and can be rapidly incorporated into a production J2EE execution environment to meet rigorous performance and availability requirements. With ActiveVOS Server, teams can leverage existing skills and collaborate to develop, deploy and run production business process management applications.

Self Service Dashboards

Along with the adhoc report and adhoc analysis, you can now create an adhoc dashboard.

Dashboards

Creating dashboards is extremely simple. All you need to do is select a dashboard title, layout design, and appropriate theme. Once that is done, you can select the content of each of the components of the dashboard. This content can be a chart, report, or an analysis. The dashboard content can be filtered using a criteria selecting drop down filter.

Dashboard Designer

Using this new functionality, business users can now create rich dashboards on the fly.

As mentioned earlier, these services are extremely popular among individual users for personal use. However, they are not being rapidly embraced as an effective cost cutting strategy to reduce corporate communication expenses. One of the barriers in its adoption as a corporate solution is the perceived complexity associated with setting up a PBX (Private Branch Exchange). Establishing and maintaining traditional PSTN PBX systems are not within the realm of IT competencies. It involves expensive hardware and specialized (out-sourced) telecom services. However, open-source PBX systems such as Asterisk have made it extremely easy for systems admins at any level to setup and manage a PBX. Asterisk is an open source software PBX, created by Digium, Inc. and has a continuously growing user and developer base. It can run on any server hardware that is capable of supporting Linux or UNIX platform.  Asterisk can seamlessly replace your existing PSTN PBX while extending your communication network into the VoIP domain. Further, to make things even more easier, open source software systems like Elastix and TrixBox have embedded Asterisk within their environment, added several value added services, and provided a one-click installation for the entire integrated PBX software. Being open source, all these systems are FREE.

Businesses having multisite international offices or those incurring frequent international communication must give a serious thought to this form of virtually-FREE communication infrastructure.

VoIP Architecture

Using the above simple architecture, the following calling patterns can be achieved with minimal costs:

1.       Calls within the same office (same country)

·         Since all the extensions within the same office connect to a single PBX server, calls made among them are FREE

2.       Calls from an office in one country to an office in another country

·         Since both office have an IP-based PBX and communicate over the Internet (using SIP protocol), calls between the two office are FREE (irrespective of their geographic location)

3.       Calls from an office to landline/mobile of the same country

·         This is a local call, hence local charges apply

4.       Calls from an office in one country to landline/mobile of another country having an office

·         The call is connected from source IP-PBX to the destination IP-PBX over the Internet (FREE), and from destination PBX to the landline/mobile is made as a local call. Hence the cost is that of a local call in the destination country

5.       International calls from an office to any other country (where there is no corporate office)

·         The IP-PBX of each office can be connected to global VoIP provider that can offer international calls at extremely cheap prices

To summarize, a majority of businesses suffer from high international telecommunication expenses. Considering the current economic situation it is paramount for organizations to look for ways to reduce this expense. VoIP coupled with a robust, reliable, and FREE commercial-grade PBX such as Astreisk can certainly help in achieving this objective.

The core of the Pentaho BI system comprises of the BI server that hosts all the BI components and provides the infrastructure for report scheduling, viewing, and user management. All the BI elements are systematically organized into a logical hierarchy of browsable folders called “Solutions”.  Its latest release, Pentaho 2.0, offers a sleek AJAX/Web 2.0 based user interface.

My evaluation of Pentaho 2.0 is based on the following components:

Pre-Published reports

Pentaho provides the ability to create pixel perfect reports using the Pentaho Reports Designer.

The reports designer provides all the functionality that comes with any standard report creation tool. For the non-technical folks that are not very comfortable with report creation it also offers a convenient and easy-to-use wizard-based report creation interface.

Once these reports are created, they can be easily deployed on the reporting server into one of the available solutions where they can be invoked by users on demand, run in background, or scheduled for periodic executions.

Ad-hoc Reports

Pentaho BI allows business users to dynamically (ad hoc) create reports and share them with colleagues and peers without having to rely on the IT department. A simple web-based wizard guides business users through the steps to create and publish ad hoc reports.

Dashboards

Pentaho provides all the facilities to create visual dashboards using JSP technology. Complex dashboards can be designed by connecting various individual elements in a simple JSP page. Alternatively, one can create dashboards without writing a single line of code using the Community Dashboard Framework. However I have not yet used the CDF.

Reporting Workflows

At the heart of the Pentaho BI server is the concept of process flow (referred to as Action Sequence). An action sequence is the smallest unit of work that the Pentaho server is capable of executing. Hence, every report on Pentaho (ad hoc or pre-published) is converted into an action sequence in order to be executed. An action sequence is am XML document with a .xaction extension. The concept is a little heavy to grasp in the beginning. But once you get a hang of it, the notion of a BI workflow allows you to do some of the most powerful things that can be expected on any BI system. Tasks like report bursting and exception-based reporting become pretty simple to achieve.  Pentaho has an eclipse-based design studio allows you to create complex action sequences with minimal effort (once you get over the learning curve).

Metadata Model

In order to simplify the complex relations between various data sources in a report, Pentaho provides a metadata model (similar to Universes in BusinessObjects). Ad hoc reports depend on such business centric data models to shield the business user from complex data relationships. The metadata editor provides all the functionality to achieve this.

Administration

Along with feature rich functionality for the end users, Pentaho BI also offers strong support for system administration. This is the key component where the enterprise edition offers more functionality than its free counterpart. The community version allows support for user management, roles management, data source management, service management, and public schedule management. The enterprise edition offers additional support for performance monitoring, audit monitoring, server clustering, and automated content cleaning.

To summarize this article, I must say I was impressed with the features offered by Pentaho. Its free community edition seems to offer more functionality than several commercial BI systems. It does have its share of bugs and problems, but nothing that you can’t live without. I have not yet evaluated its analytical report capabilities (Mondrian) as well as its data mining functionality (Weka). Pentaho also has a strong data integration system called Kettle. More on all of these topics very soon.  

More and more companies that are interested in improving the way they do business are adopting open source business intelligence. They are choosing open source for a variety of reasons, but primarily they have their eye on the bottom line. Because open source business intelligence gives companies options, they are able to save money on their business intelligence (e.g. Actuate, Pentaho, Jaspersoft) system. It also gives them the ability to improve the system they are working with as business intelligence technology grows and changes, instead of investing in a completely new platform. Because of this flexibility and forward motion, these companies are seeing opportunities for their businesses that they would have missed with an outdated system. Open source can also help your company get the best BI applications for your business.

Plenty of Options

Open source allows for adoption across application servers, in particular, Java-based applications because they are standardized and easy to merge with open source solutions and tools. Your company can choose the solutions that fit the business intelligence needs. Because you can pick and choose what you want to adopt, you aren’t saddled with an unwieldy system that does more or less than you need.

Right Price

The ability to have options will help your company save money on business intelligence solutions, but you will also see cost benefits of having a software infrastructure that permeates all the way through the application layers of your technology package. Your company can adjust your tech budget to reflect real world purchasing ability. You’ll also see financial rewards when the IT team is able to dedicate their time to more important issues than generating reports once you’ve invested in an open source reporting tool.

Innovative Technology

Because of the pricing structure of open source business intelligence, it is far easier for companies to upgrade their business intelligence systems as the technology improves. Updates will allow you to get the full benefits of your business intelligence program. Because you and other consumers will be more active in looking for ways to improve their systems, the competition among business intelligence providers to provide new technologies will increase, spurring innovation and creating new choices for consumers.

Finding the right business intelligence solution can be tricky, but open source technology makes it much easier for your company to find the right tools to generate the information you need. Open source business intelligence is becoming more and more beneficial to consumers as time goes by and because of your ability to get updates, you won’t have to wait for the next version of the tool you need to start reaping the benefits of having a business intelligence system.

A large number of SMEs and big-scale enterprises are adopting the open-source path for their mission critical IT needs. One of the key features of open source software is that it offers added flexibility to organizations to alter the source code of the application to fit their business processes. Along with flexibility, open source systems are significantly cheaper than their proprietary counterparts. Both these aspects prove to be great motivating factors when enterprises evaluate business applications. A large scale open source developer community, extensive peer review system, transparent design, robust architecture, and standards-based implementation make open source solutions a better and reliable alternative for integrating into existing business solutions. 

Outlined below are some of the advantages as well as common myths associated with open source solutions

Advantages:

Low Cost of Ownership

Open source solutions generally require no licensing fees. Some commercial flavors of open source systems are associated with licensing fees (along with support and maintenance fees), however these costs are very low compared to other commercial alternatives.

Huge support

Every popular open source system is supported by a vast community that has deep insight and understanding of the system. Such a peer-based support is often faster and superior to those offered by several proprietary systems. Further, several commercial open source systems offer paid support in addition to that offered by the community (forums and wikis).

Easy License Management

Open source software licenses are extremely simple. There is no concept of cpu-based, user-based, load-based, and site-based licensing. Obtain the software once and install it on as many servers as you wish supporting any number of users required. Now that is simple!

Support for Scalability

Most of the open source systems have load balancing and fault tolerance concepts inherently embedded into their design. Hence there are multiple options for load balancing, clustering, and fail-over available in open source applications. Such options are available in proprietary applications as well but at significant costs and licensing charges.

No Vendor-Lockin

Open source systems that are based on open standards are free from vendor specific lockins. It is very much possible for a proprietary company to shut its shop or get sold to another company thereby discontinue its services after a while. With support from the community, Open source software is independent of a single vendor and gives a strong sense of continuity.

Greater Quality Software

Open source software is available publicly. A large amount of developers globally contribute and analyze the code making it more secure and constantly increasing the quality. The peer review process drive excellence in design.

Myths:

Open source systems (being free) offer no service or support

Gone are the days when open source applications were limited to university students developing experimental code and distributing it freely. A majority of contemporary open source applications are termed as commercial open source and are developed by profit making organizations (Red Hat, Pentaho, etc). They either have a low licensing fee, a low support fee, or a feature rich commercial version. In either ways these companies make enough money to provide commercial grade support and maintenance of the open source software.

Steep Learning Curve

It is generally assumed that grasping and understanding an open source system will take much longer due to the lack of proper documentation and learning support. However, with comprehensive community based wikis there is abundance of documentation to get anyone accustomed to an open source solution. Availability of free downloads of the entire solution further enables individuals to adapt to an open source system at their own pace. Further, with the advent of commercial open source solutions organizations more and more organizations are supporting paid learning support which significantly reduces the overall learning curve. 

Open source is not secure

It might seem to be a simple deduction of logic to think that since the code is freely available anyone can figure out how to break it. It is actually the other way around. With a vast community reviewing the open source code, any bugs or security vulnerabilities are immediately surfaced and rapidly fixed, thereby resulting in more secure code.

Open source is a work-in-progress

It is a common belief that with continuous development activities, open source system is always changing and lacks a proper release cycle. Popular systems like Linux, Apache, MySQL, etc have proved this notion incorrect with structured code maintenance and controlled release cycles. Controlled upgrades are always backward compatible and continuously offer added featured and functionality (not to mention quick bug fixes)

To summarize, the advantages of open source systems are inherent in its flexibility, community support, reliability, quality, and continuity (lack of vendor lockin). All of this either free of costs or at significantly lower costs compared to their proprietary competitors.