Pro Version Requirements

What Is The Pro Version?

It's an imaginary concept, answering the question of:

"How can Amahi help those who want to use it in a small/medium business environment?"

Quite often this also means:

"What additional features should it have before we can say Amahi is SME friendly?'

Maybe, one day, the features required will be enough for the Amahi project to advance beyond the home market. This page is to help capture those requirements.

Primary Philosophy

Rather than start with a list of technical features, a brief discussion of the philosophy of a "pro version" is necessary. In a nutshell, it would have to address a few broad areas including:

• group/user level security options for managing enterprise access
• network management and monitoring tools to keep things running
• supporting core business applications suited for the Amahi environment
• window dressing - making it look as sharp as possible

Security Requirements

Additional features in the Amahi platform would need to deal with more diverse user and group level permissions. These would limit access to Amahi dashboard in general, but would also manage access to specific installed applications and services.

Network Management

SME requirements for network administration tools vary, though several fundamental tasks can be considered, with the goal of addressing them through Amahi. Particularly needed are network monitoring tools (e.g. SNMP-related) as well as tools for administering Amahi or other servers on the network. Other tasks such as creating shares and managing file system level tasks are also important.

• Monitor network bandwidth use
• Manage subnets
• Administer network settings, DHCP, DNS
• Virus protection

Core Business Applications

SME business needs are often quite simple. A handful of well integrated applications can meet the needs of most organisational or small corporate environments. Core applications would range from communications through to media management tools and services.

• Email server and related administration tools (e.g. user management, editing settings, managing services)
• CRM (Customer relationship management) tools
• Additional VPN options
• Groupware tools - integrated email, contacts, calendar, document management, project management, etc.
• VOIP server

Specific Applications

Here are a few of the apps considered to meet the above requirements:

• CRM: SugarCRM
• VPN: Cisco VPN
• Groupware: Zimbra, Scalix, eGroupWare
• ... what else?