In this case study about a US-based manufacturing company with 200 employees replaced its legacy mainframe ERP system with opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM. In the process, the company was able to reduce costs, connect with new business partners worldwide, and replace a Windows-based IT infrastructure with Linux.

Red Hat recently posted an interesting case study on how retail giant The Gap moved from a Unix and Windows based e-commerce infrastructure to one based on Red Hat Linux.

Contrary to what you may have heard, free and open source software (FOSS) is not anti-business. But neither is it pro-business. More accurately, FOSS is focused on concerns outside of traditional business, such as user freedom and code quality. For this reason, making the two work together successfully requires special efforts and resources, as well as careful study of the various options.

When it comes down to identity management, the Windows and Linux operating systems fail to play by the same tune. But at the same time, Windows Server can be leveraged in order to manage both platforms. This is the promise of a whitepaper authored by Chris Travers, the owner of Metatron Technology Consulting and Contributing Author to the Microsoft Open Source Software Lab. Travers revealed that Windows Server 2003 R2 was effectively a turning point for the streamlining of the implementation Windows-based identity management solutions tailored for Linux.

If you're a business owner or manager, you're familiar with business card management. As many of you know from past experiences, the task of managing a company's business cards is often stressful and irritating. Fortunately, you've found the best place on the Internet to organize, manage, and print business cards for all of your employees - we make the job of managing business cards simple!

Out of the many available open source document management packages, Epiware GPL is noteworthy because it includes project management features: if your work has to do with producing written matter, you can not only manage the documents themselves, but the development project as well.

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in Wichita, Kansas. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced on July 22 at the Ubuntu Live conference in Portland, Ore., the availability of Landscape, its Web-based systems management program for Ubuntu servers and desktops.

Project management is becoming an increasingly important part of the Sys Admin's life. While Microsoft Project seems to be the standard project management tool used in most environments that I have worked in, it can sometimes be nice to have such tools web based so that multiple users can share information. This is where tools such as Collabtive come in.