Success Story: Migration to Open Source, created a success story for Pendik Municipality
While actualizing important investments with its management vision and a team that believes in this vision, Pendik Municipality is becoming an example and a success story for all local managements. Pointing out the importance of Pendik Mayor Salih Kenan Şahin’s vision, Pendik Municipality IT Manager Üstün Murat Yıldız shared information about the open source directory solution SambaBox, created by Profelis Bilişim ve Danışmanlık distinguished by its use of open source and its institutional support. emphasizing that they became a success story nationwide because of the digital transformation activities starting in 2009, Üstün Murat Yıldız talked about the foundation of this success as a local management and the strategy that they followed:
“We strengthened the decision we made in 2009 by a strategic plan and completed the scanning of documents for digitalization before 2012. We took innovative steps both in our management of the municipality and with our communication with citizens and institutions. As Pendik Municipality, we didn’t just do a standard Linux migration, we migrated all the products that can work with Linux. We chose Profelis for email and active directory migration for our open source code transformation project. We were so moved by their structural design when we met at the second Public Open Source Conference, that we partnered with TÜBİTAK for organizing a conference to invite and inform them about this matter. Instructors from TÜBİTAK and Profelis gave information to the participants at this conference. In this way, there was a connection between our municipality and Profelis, which was more than just information exchange; it became a comprehensive collaboration. While Pendik became a pilot municipality on this, our goal was to create a success story in order to make the products usable for the public. We have always prioritized working with a competent team and specialized firms.”
Emphasizing that they analyzed and tried many equivalent products before deciding on SambaBox, Üstün Murat Yıldız says:
“We conducted our analyses not only for ourselves, but for other local managements as well. Security and ease of use were some of our main criteria. We clarified our expectations according to these criteria and our needs. Subsequently, we decided to work with Profelis.”
It can be an example to all local managements
Pendik municipality brought its SambaBox investment to life in 2018 with the cooperation of Profelis. With the freedom that came with open source code, Üstün Murat Yıldız comments “We don’t see it as a finished investment. There will always be new needs.” and he points out the benefits:
“This migration was made of 26 open source products that included email document sharing, office applications, mapping and design applications, database and active directory applications. There was nothing similar to this structure in other local managements and we were the ‘first’ in this. For our active directory needs and expectations; we chose SambaBox which is an open source based local software, instead of Samba, because of its ease of management and the support they provide.
Our management and team also believed in this migration. We have digital transformation projects under many titles, we see the benefits it brings to the parties and try to share this with all local management. Open source provides this flexibility to all parties. Profelis accomplished this before with the GIBUX project for the Turkish Revenue Administration. After such a large scale and successful project, why not do the same for almost 1400 municipalities? We are ready to exemplify and support this matter.”