psMonitor: Make PDFs without Adobe Acrobat
At every IT job I’ve worked, I’ve noticed that the ability to create PDF files in business today is nothing less than an absolute necessity. Even with the pricing of Adobe Acrobat skyrocketing (about $250 per seat), and PDF becoming an open standard, it’s still difficult to find a reliable, totally free method for creating PDF documents.
My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.
What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!
Setting Up a Jabber Server
At our office we’re in the process of a migration to Exchange Server, which meant the decommissioning of our old mail server running MDaemon. Unfortunately, this meat that I had to come up with a new method for instant messaging, because Exchange no longer provides a way to set up an IM server short of their full Live Communications Server product. As I started searching for alternatives, both proprietary and open-source, I realized my main feature concerns for a new product were low cost, manageability, and server-side controls over the whole system. With Jabber open format, I found exactly what I was looking for.
Telephony, Running Servers, & Other Hackery
If you folks out there are interested in running servers out of your house, be it mail servers, web servers, streaming media, VoIP, what-have-you, or you’re interested in home-brew telephony projects, I highly recommend a blog called Nerd Vittles. Clever name, if you ask me. The site, run by a guy named Ward Mundy, contains countless full-blown, step-by-step guides to setting up all kinds of homemade systems such as Asterisk, the open-source PBX. I’ve read most, if not all, of the guides he’s got on his site and they never fail to impress. I mention this because lately I’ve been really looking forward to getting more into the whole PBX/telephony/Trixbox scene so that I may then sell my services to whomever would like them. You could easily save any small business about $10,000 per year on telephone lines, problems, and service and support from your telecom vendor. All these godforsaken proprietary PBX systems have to be the bane of every overworked engineer-cum-IT support specialist on the planet. I know every time we need ANYTHING done on our system at my office, we’re required by contract to have the lazy guy from the telecom company take his sweet 2 to 3 weeks to come out and fix it. That fat check he gets must be well worth it! Anyways, I can’t wait to turn some 2 year old machine we’ve got sitting around the office into a VoIP telephony powerhouse… and all for the cost of a few hours of research and study. I will soon supplant Johnny Repairaphone as the goto telephone master!