How do we (collectively) better support on-premise Connect deployments?

Dear Friends and Colleagues

We’ve been really please about how we are able to support so many SMART Connect cloud deployments with zero cost to the community.

While host Connect is the best way to go for the majority of organizations, we know hosting SMART Connect in the cloud isn’t an option for some organizations.

On-premise deployments require a lot more management. And in the same way that we have limited ability to provide support for managing desktop computers and networks, we have limited ability to support local office server issues.

How do we are a community better support on-premise Connect installations?

If we trained up 2 or 3 companies with skills to support on-premise installations, assuming their charges were reasonable (and reflected market rates in the countries where SMART is deployed), would there be a demand for their services?

Do people have suggestions of partners who we could engage to provide on-premise Connect deployment support?

We’d love to hear any ideas people have for how we better support on-premise deployments.

Jonathan

Hello Jonathan,
I would like to suggest capacity building for the IT Administrators within the Organizations that use SMART connect. Couldn’t it be better to evaluate the cost of knowledge transfer to on-prem IT administrators?

Peter

Peter

Sorry for the delay in getting back here.

While, as a partnership, we’d love to have the resources and capacity to build the capacity of IT Administrators, it’s beyond our resources to do this.

The vast majority of organizations are now on the free hosted SMART Connect as a Service offering. This includes a number of organizations that explored local SMART Connect and came to the conclusion the hosted solution was much better.

Our current plans focus on:

  • Making sure organizations understand the compelling value of our hosted solution
  • Simplifying local SMART Connect installations as much as possible.
  • Documenting the networking, Tomcat (webserver), database, and other server skills needed to maintain a local installation.
  • Where we can, sharing the details of consultants who can help support SMART Connect installations.

Best regards,

Jonathan

We would be grateful for you redirect us to such a company.

Also we would be grateful for consultation in the SMART Connect cloud deployment issue. Please provide us with contact details for this.

Another alternative options, that suits many, is the Docker image for Smart Connect Server. If you succeeded mastering this or you know somebody who did this, please share a link to it.

Thanks in advance.

Olegh