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.

  • q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    45 minutes ago

    I think the thing with self hosting is that it’s a hobby, and when it goes wrong, it’s part of the hobby to figure it out. But in terms of business, then it becomes a risk. By all means try and use FOSS to improve solutions. I use a self hosted dropbox / file delivery to clients as it can saturate my 1Gbps fibre which is faster than most cloud file shares, but only because if it goes wrong one day, it’s a 2 min job to use a cloud solution instead (temporarily) and email clients with the alternative solution. But I would never build something up that only ever worked via one system.

    Don’t just have data backups, have service backups. And in that regard, you may decide it’s just easier to do as others have said and use enterprise solutions from the start.

    If using a self hosted Office suite, have all files duped into a single Google Drive account for example. That way you’re only paying for one Google account and have an emergency backup solution in place.

    You may decide the savings aren’t worth the effort in what you’re trying to achieve.

  • tapdattl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    FreeIPA and Keycloak will give you directory management (LDAP and Kerberos), identity management, and single-sign on (OIDC and SAML) which if all your computers are running Linux as well, will give you centralized management of users.

    You can then set other FOSS business management/productivity applications like NextCloud, Oodoo, Seafile, OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, CryptPad, etc. To use Keycloak as its authentication mechanism.

    A lot of this will depend on what kind of work the business does.

    You’ll also want to look into log management and SEIM for security monitoring, Wazuh, Graylog, and others. This is especially true if the business has any data compliancy responsibilities in the country this is in.