IT: City of Trento moving to open source IP telephony

The system will connect twenty remote locations and ten offices throughout the city, connecting 1800 employees. About 1100 telephones have been replaced so far, says Roberto Resoli, a software analyst and system integrator working for the city.

Trento's current legacy telephony system is very expensive, Resoli said last week Thursday, speaking at a workshop on open source in Rome, part of ForumPA, an IT conference targeting public administrations. The city spends 30,000 euro per year just for renting the telephone lines. Maintenance of the legacy telephone system added another 60,000 euro per year. "The simple task of moving a phone would cost us 140 euro."

According to Resoli, migrating to the Asterisk-based solution will reduce maintenance of the telephone system to some 20,000 euro per year.

Resoli says public administrations considering similar systems, should make sure they acquire the IT know-how. "The freedom and added security of open source has a price. You need to understand it, otherwise you could run risks." Gaining such expertise is almost impossible when using proprietary systems, he adds. "This is another reason for moving to open source."

Cryptography

The administration of Trento is to move to open source wherever possible, Resoli said. "We already have ten GNU/Linux servers for our Java applications, for web proxy and email." The city still has two times that number of servers running Microsoft Windows, but Trento's strategy is to rely on open source software. "All parts of the infrastructure that we can move without too much impact on the users, are moved to open source. It saves money, but also, open source is much safer to use. These servers are not proprietary black boxes, and when there are security issues they can be fixed or quickly replaced."

Trento has been involved in the development of J4sign, an open source system for digital signatures, since 2002. Resoli is also working on several open source projects related to digital signatures, such as OpenSignPDF, for signing PDF documents and Oxsit, for signing documents made in OpenOffice.

Trento wants to use these components to allow its citizens to identify themselves on the city's website using electronic ID cards. The system, Open Portal Guard, is compliant to Italian regulations, but was originally developed the city of Grosseto, based on experiences  of public administrations in Belgium and the Porvoo Group, an e-ID initiative that was started by the administration of the city of Porvoo in Finland, but now comprises public bodies from about thirty countries in Europe, the United States, Canada and Asia.

Using open source applications and projects has the added benefit of bringing the city administration in contact with many other public bodies, Resoli says, internationally, in the region and in other parts of Italy. "Open source has helped us build ties to administrations of for example Grosseto, Udine, Padova and Firenze."

More information:

Presentation (in Italian, pdf)

Presentation (in English, pdf)