FOSS4GOV

Background-
Ministry of Education consist of 5 divisions and about 60 Branches /Unites which distributed in 6 floors. More than 800 staff grade and supportive service officers (excluding minor staff) serving under the said divisions. Among this staff about 200 are staff grade officers. This staff, specially staff grade officers used generic e-mail service providers such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail etc for their official communication. Although Ministry had an e-mail server previously, it became obsolete by the time due to Spam problem and problems with the nomenclature of the accounts.  Furthermore , it was later realized that the nomenclature used for email accounts was not compatible with eGovernment policy compliances.

The use of such e-mail systems cause the following problems.

• Difficult to ensure validity and acceptability
• Not conforming to eGovernment policy
• Difficult to ensure the security in communication
• Inability to incorporate with identity and uniqueness of the Ministry

The ministry explored some options and after analyzing the cost benefits of such systems, Moe requested the assistance of Information and Communication Technology Agency to accomplish the task of providing a low cost but secure and user friendly email system. Having analyzed few possible email options for MoE the staff of the ICTA and ICT Branch of Ministry of Education selected Zimbra as the mail  solution for MoE.

Why Zimbra?

• It is cost effective. The software can be freely down-loadable and cost is required only for installation, services and maintenances.
• Ability to use in most computer platforms (operating systems)
• Ability to customize according to the requirement of the Ministry
• Specific advanced options such as  sharing calendars, meeting reminders, briefcase, auto reply
• After installation it is easy to maintain and expand the service
• Easy to incorporate as a mobile e-mail solution
• User friendly interface
• Social networking features are inbuilt

The UK Cabinet Office has sanctioned Bristol City Council's use of open source software alongside its existing Microsoft software as part of an ongoing review of its desktop and emails systems.  Bristol originally announced its intentions in September 2010 but ran into a roadblock when it was discovered that only three email systems -- Lotus Notes, Novell Groupwise, and Microsoft Exchange -- are certified by CESG the cybersecurity arm of the UK intelligence services.  Using an unaccredited system could mean that Bristol City Council might fall afoul of security rules and be unable to process sensitive personal data and restricted government information.

However, at a meeting held on October 7 the Council was advised by Cabinet Office executives including Liam Maxwell, Director of ICT Futures and Bill McCluggage, Director of ICT policy that no security or accreditation issues exist that would prevent the evaluation and potential deployment of open source systems by the Council.  (http://bristolfutures.posterous.com/open-source-leadership-25814)

Even before the economic crisis consideration was being given to the economic benefits of using Open Source, but in recent months the noise surrounding this has become louder. Like a number of other coutnries in Europe, the UK has previously committed to using open source technologies, to using more smaller technology suppliers and as Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude said in March "to end the oligopoly of big business supplying government IT by breaking down cotnracts into smaller, more flexible projects."

It must be said, however that a recent Freedom of Information (FOI) request by the BBC found that most government departments still spend the majority of their IT budgets on software from the larger suppliers.  Perhaps the publicity given to the Bristol City Council case will motivate others to undertake a comparison between the various options.

FOSSUser which aims to educate Sri Lankan FOSS community on what is going on in FOSS ecosystem has released their October issue which has been dedicated to Dennis Ritchie who is the creator of C programme language and many more.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 8, 2011) was an American computer scientist notable for developing C and for having influence on other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix. He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007