Established as a charity more than 40 years ago to assist migrants and passengers through the port of Dover, UK charity Migrant Helpline is now one of six agencies providing assistance and support for asylum seekers and refugees entering and living in the UK.
Migrant Helplines head office is still in Dover, but it has a second large office in Croydon and 11 smaller offices throughout the UK. The charity has 170 users, and runs fairly straightforward office administrative systems.
Migrant Helpline has opted for open source software not only to save money, but also to cut down on time-consuming red tape.
We do not have a huge amount of money and all the money we do have comes from the Home Office, so it is not just the cost of the system, it is also about the admin involved, says James Dayborn, IT manager at Migrant Helpline.
We have to get purchase orders done and approval from civil servants. It may be standard business practice, but it is very painful.
The charity wanted to move to a straightforward open source-based administrative system that would be easy for its users to run. Most of our users are using Openoffice in an administrative role, but our case workers also use it to write letters.
Source: ComputerWeekly.com.
|
