Slashdot Mirror

I'm an accountant, and until Sage http://www.sage.co.uk/ start supplying software that works on Ubuntu, I need to have Windows somewhere on my computer. It is in a Parallels virtual machine at the moment.

Is there any reason why they couldn't use the US equivalent of http://shop.sage.co.uk/payrollprofessional.aspx ?

In the UK, Sage tends to be the more common accounts software, again Windows only though.

http://www.sage.co.uk/home.aspx

"When Quicken, Quick Books and Simply Accounting work, then there will be real in-roads to business."

I would suggest the Sage products are more vital to businesses.

http://www.sage.co.uk/productsandservices/home.aspx?tid=131865&stid=131870&pid=132037.

These guys are deep in every core industry and are global. A product like SageTimberline is used beginning to end in the commercial construction industry including by the owners and property managers who commissioned the construction.

It is kinda insane how powerful Sage is getting through acquisitions, they could open doors for Linux overnight.

http://www.sage.co.uk/home.aspx The various products (Line 50 etc) are generally referred to as "Sage".

You make reasonable points, though I reserve the right to disagree with some.

I take it you haven't used different versions of MS Office over the years or tried OpenOffice recently.
I have done both.

Former employers have handled the incompatabilities in different versions of Office very easily - they didn't ever upgrade. Yes, I was using Office '97 in the year 2003.

My current workplace has settled on one version - Office XP, as it happens - and I have no plans to upgrade everyone to 2003. There are several issues with 2003 which make it a non-starter for us, so XP it is.

Regarding recent versions of OpenOffice : I grant you they're far better. But, despite the (very true) argument that 98% of people don't use most of the features, that means 2% of people do. And, more often than not, the 2% that is using some particularly obscure feature is in an important role within the business (think: senior finance management), and the cost-savings argument has to be phenomenally large to merit the work of running two office suites at once. Seeing as business volume licensing for Office typically knocks at least 50-70% off the "official boxed retail price" (does anyone actually pay this?), the per-user cost starts to look pretty reasonable.

As I said before, I don't think it's impossible. But there's a certain /. mindset which seems to say "It's easy! You've got OpenOffice, what more do you want?!" - clearly from your post you've not subscribed to that.

Sage is a popular piece of accounting software. http://www.sage.co.uk/ Finance folk tend to be fairly conservative in outlook, so an alternative that was developed by a bunch of people calling themselves hackers which has a lousy user interface simply isn't going to be accepted.

SageLine 500 has been available for Linux for some time now...