Free Software Tools For IT Management and Processes Organization: Case Study In Scientific Research Environment

摘要

This paper promotes the need of choosing some and integrating the large variety of Free and Open Source Softwares (FOSS) to provide an integrated solution for information technology management and process improvement. The main motivation is that the amount of FOSS that can be used in a working environment is so large that only very specialized companies can fully benefit from them in an integrated way. Hence, to allow smaller groups to efficiently use FOSS this work not only advocates the need of creating a complete package of tools, but presents a case study consisting of a set of tools for project management, access control, file sharing and other essential processes. For the sake of concreteness, the adoption of these tools by a group composed by approximately fifty people of a research laboratory, illustrates how they can improve the productivity of relatively small companies.