At Freelock, we wrote the book on using open source software to solve business problems. Our consultants examine all aspects of your business: marketing, sales, operations, and finances, and help you identify where it makes the most sense to spend your technology dollars.

Most non-technology businesses spend somewhere between 1% and 9% of their revenue on technology. If your spending is at the high end of this range, talk to us about how open source might be able to reduce your costs. If your spending is at the low end of this range, talk to us about how technology may provide new opportunities for your business, helping remove the roadblocks to growth.

We work with a broad range of open source projects, matching up the best solutions to meet your needs. Some of the projects we work with include:

• Joomla
• Drupal
• ZenCart
• SugarCRM
• MediaWiki
• LimeSurvey
• Mailman
• Mantis
• PHPList
• Moodle
• LedgerSMB

While all of these systems run on a Linux server, you don't need to switch to Linux to make them work in your business. Because these are all web applications, the only thing you need is a web browser to make them work for you. 

Most of our open source solutions are built on what is called the "LAMP Stack." LAMP refers to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Python/Perl. We have expert PHP programmers on staff, with experience working with most of the open source projects we recommend as well as complete custom web applications.

Looking for a custom Joomla theme, or a Drupal module? We can help. Need to get the results of a LimeSurvey survey into SugarCRM? We've done that. Need a custom web application to replace a legacy system? Give us a call.

Our favorite libraries include many of the PEAR classes, the Smarty template system, the Dojo AJAX toolkit, Prototype/Scriptaculous, and others.

Many of our custom projects were begun by other developers who got stuck and left the project. Most of these we've been able to finish and launch. Some of our custom sites include:

• A product catalog web site for a manufacturer that gets automatically updated from their ERP system with an extensive administrative back end
• A client extranet for a telecommunications software company, providing shared content along with individual content for particular customers. This system allowed automatic sign-ups based on the email addresses of their clients, and provided sophisticated tracking within the site.
• A recreational sports team management system, expanded to manage umpires for a regional Little League

Looking for someone to manage your Linux server? Look no further, we can help you with that. Our system administrators are experienced with most aspects of system administration:

• File and print sharing (Samba)
• Web Servers
• Mail servers (especially Postfix)
• DNS/Bind
• Monitoring systems
• LDAP/Authentication systems
• VoIP systems, Asterisk
• Thin Client Systems, LTSP

Our system administrators can help you plan and deploy an appropriate backup system, decide how much hardware you need for your business (or whether you should just get a private virtual server hosted at a datacenter), and put together the IT part of a disaster recovery plan.

Looking to cut downtime and system administration costs? We'd love to help you deploy a Linux-based thin-client system. For the cost of managing two servers, you can have all of your workstations managed from one central image. Say goodbye to spyware and virus hassles. Reduce power costs by deploying thin clients that use as little as 5 watts of energy.

We have flat-rate server deployment plans, monthly maintenance arrangements, and we also provide custom managed hosting on our own servers.