Gallery in Australia paints open future

27.02.2007
By steadily overhauling individual pain-points in its IT infrastructure, the multimedia division of the National Gallery of Victoria's (NGV), in Australia, has adopted Linux and open source software resulting in an improved service delivery capability.

The NGV has divided its IT operations into two distinct areas - corporate IT for regular business applications and desktop support; and multimedia systems to control external facing information like Web sites and digital displays.

Multimedia systems developer Maksim Lim told Computerworld many of the IT change projects of the past year occurred on a case-by-case basis rather than a concerted transformation directive.

"Initially the changes were at the application level, rather than the operating system," Lim said. "We had a number of custom built internal systems that were showing their age so I started replicating their functionality in different environments."

With limited IT support, Lim wanted to make the gallery's infrastructure as simple as possible.

One example of this was the custom CMS that handled content for the five plasma displays around the gallery. Lim viewed Windows 2000 as overkill for that service so migrated the application to Linux running the Helma Web application framework.