Without entering into further details, how this could happen, and why … It’s true that something wrong happened and they assumed the consequences. I’m not talking about the small amount of money they paid to get back the password, but about the scam behind it and the name of the university in question.

I wanted to profit – as usual – and focus again on the strategic decisions of considering Open source as alternative in critical mission projects. Whatever if you are talking about ERP, CRM, BPM, DMS, … the open source alternative is always available and costless compared to proprietary solutions. Best of all, open source is a guarantee to have full control on the business and get lock-free solution.

Imagine if this project was made in an open source ecosystem, the university will never get locks anywhere, and their system might be updated easily and quickly – even if something wrong happened.

Most important things to consider to avoid locks :

• Adopt Open Source technologies
• Document everything : Business, communications, code and databases
• Adopt a backup/restore strategy
• Adopt a disaster recovery strategy
• Share the knowledge in a development team, and avoid using only one developer in a large project to minimize cost. Two or more developers will get work done faster and safer.
• Separate critical mission projects, from new alpha/beta projects. Use SOA as much as possible for integration.
• Do not go e-Business if you are not ready for it and always provide alternative in case of failure. And consider seriously that the project will fail.
• finally -in Saudi Arabia specifically- ask for support, Yesser program is doing great work and their consultants might really help to secure your e-Business.

You still don’t trust open source ?

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From yesser website, YEFI is defined as “a unified framework to implement e-government. It includes cross – governmental specifications and policies, to enable cross – governmental integration and facilitate G2G transactions and data sharing.”

While reading deeply about YEFI, I noticed that the framework cover almost everything we need – for integration purpose at least – between different government institutions. The common part of the schemas between different ministries is almost the same : Address, ID number, place & date of birth, Last and first name, while they keep different names.

The creation of data catalog is the first step to get these data defined, where every entry should include as fields : Name, Business information, Format, Validation, Verification, XML Schema IDs, Values, Default value, Owner, Version and Acceptance date. The data schema will be in this case the collection of all these elements defined in data catalog.

The schema should include meta data; if we are sending person’s data for example the schema should start with meta data as : Business object created, Business object updated, owner, data schema ID, Global unique object ID; then followed by person data as : Person birth place & date, First & Last name … etc.

A central repository for the standardized schemas is required to handle persistent data of oudated schemas. As every institution data might evolve over the years, and data schema will be updated; a repository should be available to document schemas versions and conversion rules.

The recommended integration technologies standards are : WebServices for middleware, UTF-16 for character sets, XML/XSL and XML schema, and finally RDF as resource description framework.

More details on YEFI program and technical documentation are available at http://www.yesser.gov.sa/english/YEFI.asp

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