CZ: Administrations keen to use Open Source document management system

"The past few months we have been getting several enquiries per week from public administrations about our new DMS, says  Filip Molčan, chairman of the alliance. "That is remarkable, for our project has not even officially been published yet." According to him, the City of Decin, the City of Ceska Kamenice and the Regional State Archives are among the first public administrations that want to try the Open Source DMS.

The OSS Alliance and the Czech ministry of the Interior are about to publish the first version of their Open Source DMS titled Spisová slu-ba pro veYejnou správu (Open Source DMS for public administrations). "It is the first time that the government is helping to create and administer an Open Source project of this scale", says Molčan.

"It is also the first tangible result of the increased cooperation of the alliance and the ministry" added Molčan. "This is an important step and it will help to increase the use of Open Source in public government's IT systems."

The DMS is built especially for Czech public administrations. It uses the Open Source components GNU/Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP. The alliance is now working on integrating their application with Alfresco, an Open Source content management system.

Molčan says the Open Source advocacy group started developing the DMS at the suggestion of several public administrations. "They told us their proprietary DMS did not meet their needs, so we decided together with them to develop a better, Open Source alternative."

The alliance expects an increased development of the DMS once several city councils and other public administrations start to use it. "They will find it is very easy to make small adjustments to the application."

He expects most of the initial interest to come from smaller municipalities. "The price of commercial DMSs have kept this kind of applications out of their reach."

Molčan says the DMS should also be of interest to public administrators in other countries. "Anybody who is interested in developing this, should contact us."

The Czech OSS Alliance was founded in 2005 to promote the use of Open Source. It's partners include the Technical University in Prague. It also has ties to IT companies involved in Open Source, such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Software602 and Novell.

More information:

OSS Alliance