Cops drop open source for MS

Central Scotland Police is replacing its core open source systems with Microsoft technology, reports VNUNet.

The force`s IT department which serves 1 100 officers and support staff, is stripping out Linux systems in favour of Windows Server 2003, XP and Office.

Head of IT David Stirling says the force, widely regarded as an open source pioneer, is moving to Windows following an internal review which concluded that systems should interoperate with those of other police forces and local authorities.

"The review found we had too wide spread of technologies, and recommended we cut them down," he said.

But Stirling says the force is not abandoning its use of open source technology altogether.

"There are certain back-end applications, such as web servers and fire walling, where we are sticking with open source because it has done a good job for us," he said.

"I have just commissioned a major incident system which is moving over from Solaris to Linux."

Customers using Oracle 9i will now be able to use SugarCRM`s latest application, reports ZDNet.

SugarCRM is offering support for the Oracle 9i database in the latest edition of its open source CRM product, Sugar Enterprise Edition.

The previous edition of SugarCRM, Sugar Professional could only be use with the open source MySQL database.

Sugar Enterprise Edition offers support for Oracle 9i as well as MySQL, giving companies with Oracle installations the option of an open source CRM product.

Red Hat and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have announced a new partnership to help customers deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions to HP technology, reports The Star online.

The companies introduced an all-in-one software bundle designed for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and HP BladeSystem environment at the recent LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

The offering is a result of Red Hat`s collaboration in the HP BladeSystem Solution Builder program, which is designed to develop solutions to simplify and accelerate the deployment of blade infrastructures.

Red Hat products will be offered with a specially designed HP BladeSystem toolkit and the companies will also team up on clustering by making Red Hat Global File System (GFS) available with HP Serviceguard for Linux.