Evaluating Freeside

[Ivan Kohler]

On Thu, Apr 15, 1999 at 01:50:18PM +0200, Andreas.Fuchs at swisscom.com wrote:
> Hi Ivan, Folks
> 
> I am curently evaluationg a new billing system for us and found freeside.
> First thank for this great peace of software and your work !
> 
> Today we use URIBS (http://www.n2h2.com) which wont be further developed.
> 
> I have now a couple of questions:
> 
> Cause we live in Switzerland we like to enter german "umlauts", is this a
> big deal to change the input test so it accepts those ?

It shouldn't be very difficult.  I don't think the Freeside code has to
change at all; you need to teach Perl what a letter is in your locale. 
See the `perllocale' manpage. 

> I do not really understand the billing process, we do it today as follows
> and my question is can we adapt freeside to our billing sceme ?
> 
> We have three services the first is billed one time a year for 12 months,
> first bill is from starting date to the end of the year, the 2. service is
> billed for a half a year, and the third for 3 months.
> Normally we send the first bill together with the cd and the username,
> password information and then we bill for all customers at the beginning of
> the billing periods.

You could convince Freeside to bill like this.  Since all prices are Perl
expressions, arbitrarily complex billing schemes are possible.

> Our bills are printed on a secial form, which makes it easy for swiss people
> to pay. Can i adapt the bill to fit on this form ?

Yes, you could.

> The billing system today prints after entering a new account a nice paper
> which we can send to the customer, which contains username, password,
> dial-in number, mailserver, nesserver and so on, so he can easily set-up his
> dial-up network (also if he is not a Windoze user).
> Also a new customer gets e-mails with different information, like that we
> have an ftp-server, that he can read e-mail via browser and so on, can i
> implement such an service ?

Yes, you could.  Actually we had a feature like this when Freside was just
a home-brew billing package.  One of the things on the TODO list is to
pull this out of my archive of old code, clean it up and add it back in.

> We are not great programmers so it is also interessting for us to know if
> you ivan ore somebody else is willing todo such improvements for us and how
> much it will cost (hourly fee) ?

Possibly, but this isn't appropriate for the public mailing list.

-- 
Ivan Kohler <ivan at sisd.com> - finger for PGP key - <moc.dsis at navi> Relhok Navi
Open-source billing and administration for ISPs - http://www.sisd.com/freeside
20 4,16 * * * saytime # please don't be surprised if you find me dreaming too