Business

In our current troubled economy, there are even more compelling reasons to use Linux and Open Source solutions. This presentation will discuss how Linux and Open Source can reduce costs, be "green", and still provide for mission-critical levels of availability and performance.

This session will discuss multiple case studies where small business customers have deployed Open Source VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol - or internet telephony) solutions based on Asterisk to reduce expenses, increase flexibility and solve specific business problems. We will discuss real-world deployments and compare these to proprietary telephone system options. Information will be presented in a format that is appropriate for both technical and business mindsets, and plenty of time will be available for questions. Hawaiian shirts are optional, but not required.

The SciNet Consortium represents scientific researchers from the University of Toronto and the affiliated research hospitals and provides high-performance computing resources to the Canadian research community. The SciNet GPC- iDataplex system, which runs Linux, is #16 on the TOP500 List of the world's top supercomputers. Learn about how IBM and the University of Toronto's SciNet Consortium built Canada's most powerful and energy efficient supercomputer.

SugarCRM is the world's leading provider of commercial open source CRM software, available in both an On-Demand and On-Premise version and comes with a GPLv3 license. What most people don't realize is that SugarCRM is also a very extensible and easy to use business application platform. In this talk we'll explore the platform and what all it provides, and show how easy it is to customize it from the GUI as well as through writing PHP code.

The LAMP Stack is the basis of the vast majority of successful and interesting web sites and web services.

• What is LAMP
• Why LAMP
• Some applications running LAMP (Drupal, Joomla, Zope/Plone, Django)
• Some sites running LAMP (Slashdot, Digg, ...etc.)
• The L we all know and love
• The A and alternates (lighttpd, ngnix)
• The M (MyISAM, InnoDB)
• The Ps (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby [not a P!]) Focus more on PHP
• Installing LAMP
• Different ways of running PHP
• Performance considerations

This talk provides tips for improving your self-promotional skills and you'll learn how tooting the horns of your colleagues can help you network. Topics include: getting ahead by getting outside your comfort zone, imposter syndrome, the fine line between assertiveness and aggressiveness, networking by drawing positive attention to colleagues, and daily affirmations for women in tech.

Digital content is the lifeblood of any business in the information economy and companies ignore the care and feeding of electronic content at their own peril. ECM (Enterprise Content Management) could be one of the hottest areas of open source in 2010 and beyond. Attend this session to learn about the fundamentals of ECM - why the technology matters and why business users care about it.

Developers write documentation. Technical authors write manuals. But in a perfect world, your users read software self-help guides. Consumers expect documentation to reflect the sophistication of the software they are using, and will abandon an application if they cannot easily find the answer to their problems. If we really want world domination of free and open source software, we need to have the self-help guides worthy of our code. In "Self Help Guides for World Domination" we'll take a look at the strategies and tools needed for really awesome documentation.

My presentation is both a call for the Ontario government to act socially responsibly and adopt F/OSS whenever possible and an examination of the obstacles to that both here and abroad as I know them.