We use commercial software too
We love open source solutions, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for commercial software here at Ai. In fact, everyone here uses commercial software on a daily basis. I thought for today, I’d cover our servers.
Windows Server – 80% of the Ai servers I manage run linux. But we do have a couple of windows servers as we need them to run Microsoft Exchange, Quickbooks, and our phone system software. We use Windows Active Directory for authentication on our LAN, even on the linux servers. We also use and love the Volume Snapshot Service. Unlike an LVM set-up on a linux fileserver, Windows just takes care of everything. I don’t have to worry about where Windows is storing its filesystem snapshots. It’s a very nice supplement to our backup plan. It saves me a ton of time when someone accidentally deletes or overwrites a single file.
Microsoft Exchange – I don’t believe we’ll be on Exchange forever, but for now, it has one killer feature that we need. Calendar delegation. I’ve yet to see a cheaper solution that has robust calendar delegation features. If google adds that feature to google apps, we may have a future there. Oh, and if you read my last post, you’d also know that I love push email :)
Shoretel – We use a Shoretel phone system. I bet not many people here realize that their voicemail is stored on a Windows Server :) When we finally outgrew our old Bizfon, I looked into both Asterisk and ShoreTel. I would have loved to build a custom solution with Asterisk, but simply didn’t have the time. Our good friend Lou over at Brightstack gave us such a good deal on the Shoretel system that it was impossible to turn down. However, if you are ever looking for an Asterisk solution, I highly suggest you give Inter7 a ring. I found their prices to be very reasonable, and their sales guy was extraordinarily helpful. I’ve also been using some of their qmail related open source software on my servers for many years now.
JIRA – JIRA is our bug and issue tracker. It’s made by Atlassian. We used Mantis for many years, but outgrew it. We tried and liked FogBugz as well, but JIRA turned out to be much more cost effective for us.
There you have it. Ai uses commercial software too. Shhhh, don’t tell anyone.