14 DAY TRIAL // Miroslav Jovanovic, foregoing head of the Ministry of Finance IT department, in former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, presented an overview of the Open Source utilization on desktop and servers, during a conference held by the United Nations Development Programme in Skopje, last year.
According to Jovanovic, the Ministry of Finance is the largest organization in the country that's using open source software. "The IT department has been using and developing Open Source solutions and open standards ever since 2001. The entire server infrastructure has been migrated to Open Source and all new IT services are based on Open Source solutions," he said.
The several servers used by the department run Debian and offer printer service, with the help of CUPS open source printing manager. The servers also allow users to share office documents between Linux and Microsoft Windows environments, through the Samba file server. Jovanovic stated that "these centralised servers offer better printer and resources utilisation and help to cut costs."
Besides the forementioned services, the solution allowed single sign on, Quality of Service management and analysis with more cost savings. From a total of 370 desktop computers, 170 are using open source software like the OpenOffice.org office suite, Mozilla Firefox web browser and PDFCreator. Linux is being used in two departments of the Ministry, in IT and Treasury. This operating system is also run on other servers, for web, intranet, proxy, web security and content filtering services, and much more.
By using Linux, new opportunities opened up, allowing the use of virtualization software, e-mail servers, lower the power consumption and making administration, repair and recovery much easier.
Miroslav Jovanovic continued: "FLOSS provides opportunities in Europe for new businesses, a greater role in the wider information society and a business model that suits European SMEs. By providing a skills development environment valued by employers and retaining a greater share of value addition locally, FLOSS can encourage the creation of SMEs and jobs."