Graabein asks:
"I'm part of an effort to startup a VoIP provider. We've decided to use Open Source Software wherever possible. Production is not a problem, we can handle the VoIP network itself, POTS termination, web sites, email systems, all the usual stuff. The business side of things is another matter entirely. We need to be able to handle Customer Relationship data, manage subscriptions, handle invoicing and accounts, have a web shop of sorts, online billing, credit card transactions, and more. Whatever system we use has to be able to handle national standards for accounting, or at least be possible to modify to do so. We've looked at Compiere, but our business types are not impressed. Neither am I, for that matter. Requiring an Oracle license is one thing (database independence is 'in development', but it has been for a long time, with no discernable progress), not working properly with Mozilla is another (you need IE to use it fully in HTML mode). What other options are there?"
"Our business types are full of suggestions for supposedly excellent and well suited systems, however they all have in common that they require Windows on the client. If we choose one of those systems our OSS policy is pretty much moot and OSS has been relegated to (some) servers in the computer room and that's about it. I don't mind running these business functions on a Windows server if that is the best system for the job, but having to run Windows on every client in order to access the data is simply not acceptable.
We want Linux and OpenOffice on every desktop. We want to be able to access customer data from a variety of clients, even including Windows. The same goes for Accounting data, HR data, QA data, you name it. Do we have to write our own system from scratch? I'm not sure that is very realistic."
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.sql-ledger.com
Well, for now SCO seems to be doing just fine.
Mozilla runs fine on any desktop. A browser-based interface would work independent of the desktop environment you choose.
You might want to peek at OpenGroupware. My colleagues and I have skimmed though what was available and it seems to be the most impressive for at least the customer management side. Though the look of the web interface will not amaze your artist friends, it seems to work well. You can interoperate with Evolution, Mozilla Calendar and some other programs - even Outlook should you want to buy the driver.
I'd strongly suggest not to be impressed by eGroupWare's feature list and cute themes (I know WE've been fooled). Seems like these guys, though talented, are not really working towards stabilizing the tree, so you see frightening changelogs - like code rewrites between 1.0RC2 and 1.0RC3. They forked from phpGroupWare lately but I can't tell if it's a more serious project.
One of my friends is completely sold to the Horde Project so you might want to try it.
All of these will not solve all your issues but no application does and as these three above are open source, you can do the linking as you like.
Probably. You will have to design it.
Have you considered outsourcing the whole damned thing to ...."India" ? :-P
I have run into this problem a few times with my busisness. What did I end up doing? I resorted to the ultimate open source system, pen and paper. I have looked at a few packages for use as an accounting system but I seemed to always run into a problem with this and that, and when I'd try and read the documentation it sucked ass! It assumed you already knew XY and Z to get the package working when you don't really need to know them when it's finaly working. I dislike winblows as much as the next Slashdotter, but I have to say most programs in the windows einvironment install and work out of the box, and the install documentation is written at a level even a drunk person can understand.
---- Fight to protect your right to keep and arm bears! ummmm... ya I think that's right....
It costs you a couple bucks for some Windows licenses. In the grand scheme of your business, it is an insignificant cost.
It is also a business expense which makes it tax-deductible, so the actual cost is even lower than the price you pay up front for those licenses.
Suck it up and join the rest of the business world.
I have been pwned because my
I know this kind of sounds strange, but absolutely the first thing you need to do is either have everyone's cooperation, or just make the changes and make people deal with them. People are very reluctant to change, and that's the biggest problem. When you have everyone in a company used to doing their business in Windows using MS Office, you're going to have a hard time getting them to change without just going ahead with the changes. It goes against everything they teach you in school (I was a business major), but people just won't change unless they're forced. That even goes for the higher-up in the company. I'm the director of IS at my company, and you really have to go over the benefits of open source to those above you, because they know only the pay-for-the-license way of doing business. For everyone else, even though OpenOffice is so much better than many Windows programs, they're still hung-up on MS Works from 1996, because that's all they know, and they don't even care to become more productive. I guess the only point I'm trying to make is that you can't just get the average person to change...they have to be made to.
Have you looked around on freshmeat.net? There are quite a few people providing some sort of business management package. A quick search for "billing invoicing" turned up the Trabas VoIP Billing package as the first hit. Probably a good place to start. I'm sure there is plenty of stuff that will do most of what you want. Is your company comfortable with doing some minor coding on an existing project to get exactly what you want? If so, there are a lot more options.
I think this is a common problem. I run a business myself, with two friends. We've just started, but we're looking into getting things like customer related software in order before doing anything serious about ourselves. I've worked voluntary with organisations and economy before, and I know things screw up if things are not kept track of.
I think your questions are hard to answer, and even though I have searched a lot for software (not online shopping/CC, we send invoice by mail since we're only doing business inside Norway) I have yet to find anything free and useful.
We've really considered doing it ourselves, making a simpe customer registration and management system with a web frontend. Using f.i. perl modules, you can create Excel documents with tabular data, and such. So that might be a thing to do. If you accept a tiny bit of manual work, that is. Of course, that tiny bit isn't that tiny after you've got hundred customers to bill.
But at least, I know that GnuCash has some functions regarding invoicing and customer registry, but I haven't really had the time to try it out. The rest of GnuCash is good, though, so there should be a hope. So far we can keep track of our economy, and if it works, GnuCash might do our customers as well, even generating invoices.
Good luck, and I hope this post will create some feedback for myself as well. Feel free to email me if you want to discuss, by the way.
I am sorry.
Maybe I am asking for a flamewar, but why not try a professional package, i.e. not done by some open source developers who do not know BUSINESS.
Open Source Development IS GREAT!
You can find some card processing, but not for FREE!
Also - what will your customers feel that you have their PRIVATE info on open source processing software???
Your internal IT should never ever never be a gating item for letting your business department do what it needs to do. If the chairman of the board likes MS Word and just doesn't "get" Open Office, then the amount of his and your time that you burn trying to show him the light will forever outweigh the cost you would have paid to get him a Crossover license and a copy of Word and keep him happy and concentrating on what he is supposed to be doing.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
For CRM, we use TUTOS.
For accounting, it's SQL-Ledger. Both the CRM and accounting apps are backed by PostgreSQL.
For office suites, OpenOffice.
Web browsing is Mozilla; e-mail is whatever our employees prefer (Mozilla, Kmail, Evolution, Pine, Mutt, whatever...)
We are completely MSFT-free and intend to stay that way.
It is a closed source general accounting software, but it runs on Linux, and the clients are linux too.
It takes off where Great Plains Classic left, when it got shut down by microsoft in favor of MS Dynamics, and i think its great, rock solid stuff. (passport, not Dynamics)
Also, it is written in COBOL, and uses ACUCORP's ACUCOBOL runtime, for which you need a license. Finally, ACUCORP provides an ODBC driver that works pretty nicely with PHP for web frontends and reporting, and also runs on Linux.
The only gripe I have, is terminal emulation in Konsole, 'cuz the graphics characters come out as A-umlauts and what have you, and i cant seem to find documentation for that issue anywhere.. suggestions?
*shower*
Strange yous say this. I've been running Firebird 0.7 since it came out. It's technically still beta. But it's only crashed on me once. Perhaps you should TTFP?
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
VMWare $280
WindowsXP License $180
Quickbooks Pro $300
Not risking a business to save $760, priceless.
In the end you'll get more out of doing it right the first time than you will by screwing up your accounting/etc and hiring someone (or wasting someone's time) to fix it.
Apt-get sounds like a perfect fit for your requirements. It is open source, so it can be modified to suit local accounting rules and regulations. There are several Fortune 100 companies already using apt-get for CRM, but they generally don't like to talk about it because the big vendors get pissed off. Just do a man apt-get, and read the 'CRM and Accounting' section, just below 'How to configure a local mirror'. You won't be sorry.
Two dollars for Windows licenses sounds too good to be true!
i love trolls
They have not delivered on their Open Sources promises. The 'PostgreSQL' port was supposed to be done, or at least in a useable form last year. Now the project is 'MySQL or whatever' and is still undone.
To hear it is 'tied' to Internet Exploder is a sad bit of knowledge to hear.
Tax-deductible expenses only do you any good if you have profits to write them off against!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Simple answer: what you are looking for does not (yet) exist.
There are a lot of fancy applications on the net, none of them any usefull for your purposes (and please prove me wrong, I'd though I had been pretty thorough)
Having looked at the same problem for my own small business I'd say that if your business is essential to you, you either start asking for quotations for companies that can deliver a solution to fits your purposes or find a stock application that does most of what you need. (and does it in a way that most members of staff understand it)
Look at the price, and see if its matches your needs and budget.
As you are setting up your own business, you should NOT be fooling around trying to recreate the wheel; you will need al your energy to focus on your business and hope that it doesn't go belly up.
One sure way of doing that is having a dozen incompatible systems hide all your major business information from you, your customers, and your staff.
I was recently asking this same question, albeit for a home-based consulting business.
The solution that I found was SQL-Ledger. While it is overkill for my needs, I think it might fit your criteria quite well.
If they have made the idiotic 'policy' to eschew a whole class of useful software, it's unlikely they'll be around in a couple years. Bad business sense usually becomes evident after the company's business plan has started execution and the problems begin to surface. Lucky for the poster, such bad business decisions are evident from the get-go.
Get out now!
If OSS isn't going to cut it for what is really the single most import reason for giving your staff desktops in the first place, why are you so insistent that windows be kept out of your business?
Don't let your technical expertise convince you that you can make a better commercial decision than the suits.
And I've been running 7.5 preview 1 since December and it hasn't crashed once.
That was my last purchase from Intuit. I have removed it from my system and it sits on a shelf.
The good news is that if you are willing to use a proprietary ERP system, then running Linux on the user's desktops will work just fine, several of them run just fine on Linux (primarily using a web browser interface -- mozilla works just fine). An example would be most of the Oracle's suite of software. This will allow you to have Open Source desktops and the like (with at least some ERP vendors you can have linux running on the servers too). Unfortunately, There are no good open source ERP systems yet that I'm aware of, although your requirements span quite a bit and software and undoubtedly some of the tasks can be handled well with open source software.
One last piece of advice, customization is expensive and to an extent unavoidable, so consider how close the system comes to your ultimate result, how familiar your team is with the technologies involved, etc...)
I would convert all you images to BMP, then use a program like WinRAR to pack them all into a "concrete archive."
The concrete format ensures that your files will be rock-solid readable 25 - 50 years from now, as long as you only access them infrequently (say 3 - 4 times a year). That's more than an order of magnatude longer than you specified, so I hope that'll work.
only idiots would trust their business to an open source browser.
To be quiet honest, I find that sort of ridiculous. The business I work for insisted on Macintosh and has been using Quickbooks since before I got there, but if I were using OSS to help a business there are certainly things it can do better than pen and paper.
A simple spreadsheet in gnumeric or OpenOffice is surely faster than calculating by hand. Word Processors are a dime a dozen. I don't believe there is anything like quickbooks (heck, I have one windows machine around just so I can run Quicken) but there are certainly programs available that would make your life easier. Even the "easy to install/use" distros generally include abiword, gnumeric, and OpenOffice.
Some net apps require Microsoft extensions or are written using proprietary IE calls and absolutely MUST be run on IE. And don't tell me changing the browser id string will make it work. That will eliminate the warning messages but not make things work. I am having to deal with this issue right at this moment.
You will likely need windows for some things, unfortunatly. Fortunatly Wine works very well for a lot of window programs, and since you are looking for which one you use, you can demand Wine compatability from the start.
Don't be a jerk instisting on all open source, you have a buisness to run, and that means spending money once in a while. Don't waste your money (except by sending it to me....), but don't be too frugal either. If you can only get what you need from a pay software, buy it and get on with your buieness.
P.S. buy Crossover as your wine implimentation, those guys put a lot of support into wine and should be helped. (Or alternativly you can get WineX, but they focus on games so I doupt you care about their advantages)
Ive been playing around with this one. The storefront interface is very similar to what amazon.com uses.
it handles many different payment systems including internationally recognized ones.
taxes, inventory, shipping, etc..
http://www.oscommerce.com/
good luck.
The Lizard.
MySQL.
GNU Project.
Slackware Linux.
Mepis Linux.
K Desktop Environment.
Gnome.
Perl.
Apache WebServer.
Roxen WebServer (very intuitive, and GPL!).
Phew!! And that's a short list!! There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of open source, free-for-all applications.... so many it's almost absurd not to use them!! Go ahead and get them!
For black and white just use 300 dpi images. Tiffs offer typically very little compression unless they have some special codecs. I have access to high end Xerox document scanners with massive feeders and they primary use tiffs for rasterizations and wrap them in a proprietary compression format. But in the print industry, PDF storage of files you dont want to alter too much in the future seems to be the way to do it.
Open Source doesn't mean free. If you use mySql/ReiserFS in a commercial environment you will have to pay a fee (but you get the code).
If you need Oracle and Windows to manage clients, then purchase a license for both. You could start out as a free company, and then work out the bugs without licensing issues. Start charging for the service later. As far as business/CRM software is concerned, IBM and SAP both offer professional services for Linux (but you need some money).
Your not going to get free access to the credit card clearing houses using open source or proprietary software. You need a merchant license for this (along with money in the bank too). Software is easy to write, FDIC approval is harder.
But then again, why a VOIP company? Did anyone write a business plan first? Who is your target audience? Slashdot users? Not me, I'm still comfortable with the landline connection to 911/1-800-CALL-WIFE that doesn't go down in a power outage or DOS attack. Can't get that with dialup/DSL/Cable.
My opinion. Enjoy.
It's just the normal noises in here.
Just meet some black fellow humans, have a beer with them and then conclude that you may have made a stupid racist. I was a racist a couple of years ago but now I am not anymore. Yes, peoples ARE different but that's nice. Don't degrade black people please.
Citrix. Put one or more Citrix servers in the server room. Put the few apps you can't find anywhere else on it. Citrix has clients for pretty much anything.
You're set. As open source apps start filling the gaps switch over. No, Citrix isn't cheap but it works. It works very well.
ofbiz.org
It's not a complete solution yet. But it has an excellent framework and a quite active group of programmers behind it.
So what? Your OSS policy isn't business-critical. You're not looking to run an open source company, you're looking to run a VoIP company. If the "business types" want to run the books on a copy-protected closed-source system, let them. Why is this your decision to make?
One thing I've learned in nearly 20 years in a variety of IT support and management positions is that what I think is cool or morally superior doesn't matter. If the customer wants XYZ, then that's what he wants, and my job is to give it to him as quickly and efficiently as I can, and keep it running as well as possible. Jeez, you know, I'd have the best system in the world if it wasn't for those damned customers...
You're running a business. Get over the idealism and focus on what you _need_.
.7 version borked the checks and you've upgraded to .8 and that borked the witholding info so now you need to rebuild it -- that's unacceptable. Bite the bullet and focus on your business needs.
You need an accounting system that an auditor from a public firm will write an unqualified opinion on. In general this is going to mean a commercial product -- Solomon, Great Plains, Quickbooks, etc.
You need a payroll system that always works. Flawlessly. Many companies outsource this. Explaining to folks that the
You need a business plan that the investors technical people will sign off on. Betting everything on untried and little-used systems isn't going to get you there.
So for a lot of things: buckle down and do what needs to be done.
For the other 90% -- use open office, linux or bsd desktops, open groupware or even openexchange (suse). There are plenty of Linux/BSD/Apache/whatever storefront systems. Work on it. For the accounting/finance/etc folks -- get a windows terminal server and use rdesktop for those windows apps.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
asking Novell about this? It sounds like what they're trying to do with their SuSE acquisition.
C|N>K
If you are a startup looking to get into the VoIP market, chances are almost all of your customers are going to be running some kind of Windows based computer.
While I applaud open source and use it myself wherever I can personally, and in our offices, we still all have Windows machines on our desks.
If 95% of your customer base (and honestly the number is probably higher) is using Windows to either use your product, learn about your product, or do things like manage their accounts it is foolhearted to not have that technology available yourself.
Our servers and backend systems all run Linux, and yes it does save us money, but don't handicap your business' already statistically slim chances for success by not using a platform most of your customers will!
If Compiere was released under a suitable free software license, you could hire Eric Raymond to add whichever features you require, like database independence, for example.
/dev/lpt1" really all that hard?
Of course, after the 12 months or so it would take him, you'd be tied to MySQL and none of the enterprise RDBMS features would work anymore, it'd be slow as hell, would work reliably only on commodity x86 hardware, and the only way to do a backup would be 'tar'. There's beauty in simplicity, though, right?
On the bright side, you'd have three competing natural language config syntaxes to use, all written in python with an optional elisp plugin and a totally rad TeX output mode for your invoices. Too bad the binary printer drivers no longer work. "Impact printing" is all the rage, though, I hear, and is "# cat invoice.txt >
if by CRM you mean leads, opportunities, sales pipeline type stuff have you considered a hosted model? something like salesforce.com may be worth a look. keeps you out of the business of managing apps. just make sure they work with your browser (e.g. if they write custom controls that require a certain browser that may present problems).
What about some of this much ballyhooed CRM on-demand stuff from Siebel, IBM, etc.?
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
Upgrade to what? Opera? HA! If Mozilla is crashing on you that often, maybe you should look at your system.
Your Customer Support department really needs to run the same OS as the customers they are supporting, so they can recreate problems and sound like they know what they're talking about when walking through steps to solutions. Unless all your customers are Open Source only shops, this means at least most of your customer support personel are going to need Windows boxes.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
You won't die if you hold your breath, unlike what you suggest. Instead, you'll just pass out at some point and your brain will start involuntarily causing you to breathe again. Nice try, though, troll.
I'm a registered user of Opera 7.23, and I've seen this browser crash more than anything except Konqueror. It got to the point where I had to disable Java to get performance up to a bearable level.
Now don't get me wrong -- Opera is a great browser in terms of rendering and power-user features, but I have managed to crash it simply by going back and forward several times in quick succession. It also leaks memory: my memory cache is 4 MB, but I've seen the browser occupy at least 50 MB on several occasions (usually right before it crashes).
For more information, click here.
You mentioned that you needed to process credit cards. Check out my employer, TrustCommerce, which offers a completely open source credit card processing API for connecting to our payment gateway. It compiles on tons of platforms (including Linux), and we have versions for many programming languages: C, C++, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, ColdFusion, Lisp, etc. All code is GPL.
OSS does a lot of things well. Things like development tools, operating systems, servers, and, well, I'm stumped past that. I've been running linux for 9 years, and it is all I run at home, so I'm not some MS flunky. OSS also does a lot of things really poorly. Easy installation, self configuration, and interoperation with business software are some of those things. As a startup you can't afford the time it takes to make OSS software interoperate with business software and other companies you will be working with. Start keeping track of the hours you spend trying to install and configure and make your OSS software work in this specific area, and you'll quickly see it isn't free. I'm guessing every piece of software you need is up to par and available right now in the commercial world, for a few thousand dollars. That isn't much considering the time and trouble it will save you.
Your accountants and your tech staff are totally different people right? If the accountants want to use Windows, and your techs want to use Linux, why not?
I can totally understand the desire to be in total control of the software on your mission critical VoIP system, and Open Source makes a lot of sense. But forcing accountants who know zip about it to use Linux is foolhardy; the time wasted fumbling with an unfamiliar system will dwarf any savings (financial and spiritual) gained by using some open source thing.
I played with it for a while but the bosses where I work went with anther, Windows-based management system, that has as yet proven too difficult and unstable to actually put into production.
NetLedger
You are not going to find an out-of-box product that is perfectly made for your business. Use the open-source LAMP combination (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to build your own application complete with a built-for you database scheme and user interface. That way, you're sure it'll support absoultely everything your business does, and have the ability to upgrade the software should you ever expand into another product line.
Hire a consultant, and make sure you own the rights to the resulting code when you're done.
...we get it all the time, customer wanting xyz because it's the latest buzzword, or their friend uses it or they've been seduced by an evil marketing-droid.
If it fits in with what they need to do and will give them more bang for their buck then go for it. However, sometimes they don't realise that solution xyz has problems efg and that actually solution hij would not only alleviate those problems but cost them less to have supported.
Hopefully they will eventually come around to the fact that they didn't know what they heck they were doing when they specced xyz, that you are indeed the expert and ask for your assistance, net result? Everything will be right as rain.
Now if they won't budge on wanting xyz, and it will be a PITA to support, you have to ask yourself:-
how much will it cost me to offer that support?
and: how much business (on top of the current project) will I see as a direct result of taking them on?
If it will cost you more than it will bring in, it's time to either outsource it or let the customer know you can't do it for the price they want. They'll probably thank you for your honesty and come back to you when everyone else says the same.
I am NaN
Do you really expect the OSS community to handle all the yearly complex changes in teh accounting code?
If you do, you are an idiot and you deserve what you have coming.
try the 7.5 preview (preview 2 should come soon) it's rock solid and back/forward crash you mention has been fixed.
ah finally a browser that uses up huge amount of ram, it was going to waste there sitting unused.
Open Source Java super-integrated shop-in-a-can.
The Open for Business Project sports many features and integrated technologies. Just really impressive stuff, cannot list all the goodies here.
Well, Martha Stewart's stock broker was into reefer and ecstasy. You'd be on a terminal a lot and could probably learn about math like derivatives -- if only as a personal sideline.
Read a book called "Confessions of a Stock Broker" many years ago that basically argued that they have ethics only somewhat below back street used car salesmen. I say go for it.
Used to be the military was a place where you could work hard and party hearty but with drug testing I don't know that I'd sign up for Iraq.
No. I think it is stock broker or roadie for you.
I can tell you that there are problems you may encounter at the moment trying to get all your needs met and integrated in the way you want. At best, you can probably buy a license for some components that are not yet available via OSS.
Here is what HERMES offers at the moment:
Web based CRM including appointments and tasks for customers.
Features that should be out within another month or 2 include:
internal communications system (i.e. communications not involving customers)
Interal appointment handling (i.e. appointments not involving customers)
Appointment and task delegation.
In the mid range, I will offer UI independence via SOAP, LDAP, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP.
In the long run, we want to offer most of what you are looking for. Please understand though, that I have been unable to find any open source packages for handling credit card transactions, so you would probably need to pay for an (expensive) license for such a component.
Subscription management etc. is not a problem-- there are OSS solutions that could be modified to do this with a trivial amount of work.
Anyway, Hope this helps.
I have heard good things about SQLledger, but IIRC, it runs on MySQL, which has a nasty habit of truncating large numbers, so I am not sure if I would trust it. It should be easy to port to PostgreSQL though, I would think.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
might be what you are looking for. http://www.gnuenterprise.org
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like enough of it is done yet to be useful. They are working on frameworks on top of which all the applications can be built, but nothing "ready to go" is available yet.
BWAHAHAHA
:^D
Best. Troll. Ever.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
SimpleData CRM/ERP business software. Works on IE and Netscape, and runs on open-source amp (apache mysql php) platform. I work for this company and we have already over a 100 company sites using it.
I'd guess so for OS X. It's written in Objective-C, using WebObjects in a GNUStep environment, so the environment is kinda familiar for the Mac OS.
Of course these facts come for the absolute UNDISPUTED source of proven independant facts, Microsoft.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
When I started at my current employer we were an all Windows NT 4 company. Our embedded devices used Dos as well. After discussing the benefits of Linux vs. Windows CE/Pocket PC my manager decided we should write our new software for Linux. Although our software isn't open source, it's a minor step forward (in my opinion). One of our former employees who was incharge of shipping wrote all the databases in Access, which up until now has been a pain in the butt to find an alternative. If you have the time using Apache+PHP+MySQL is a great way to integrate a database for general purposes however it's fairly time consuming. Another alternative is using Open Office's data sources functionality and creating your own forms within the documents. It's similar to Access from what I've played with it, but I'm no Access expert. I do know that you access DBase, MySQL, and several other database types and since OpenOffice is available for Windows/Linux it's something to consider. I haven't found anything good as of yet and the accounting department is pretty reluctant to hand over their software for me to test in Wine. =D
Requiring an Oracle license is one thing ..., not working properly with Mozilla is another (you need IE to use it fully in HTML mode). What other options are there?
If you use Oracle Applications, you might be interested in Oracle's announcement that they're going to be supporting Mozilla.
That takes care of half of the problem.
-ez
Karma: Whore (you look at your article scores after posting)
Have you looked at the Quasar accounting app for Linux ?a mnews 1/
Review at:
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=7781/s
If you really want Linux on the clients, but can't replace certain Windows apps, invest in a big Windows server running Citrix. It's expensive, but presumably you'll make back some of that cost in reduced maintenance.
... and get together with an MBA, and write the killer app for OS. Put together a modular business package, customizable for a variety of businesses (that's where you make the money). Look at ACC-PAC for inspiration. Most businesses need :
:)
Accounts Receivable/Customer relations
Accounts Payable/Supplier relations
Inventory
Payroll/ HR management
This ain't rocket surgery. It is painfully dull, boring and potentially stupidly lucrative.
As one person I suggested it to said: "Thom, that would be great but involves two things that geeks hate: writing accounting software, and cold calling."
Most businesses that need this desperately are small to medium sized businesses that are currently using a few thousand dollars worth of computer hardware exactly the same way they would use a two hundred dollar typewriter.
When I started where I work, inventory was typed out in MS Word, and printed out once a year, with additions hand written throughout the year. We're currently paying someone several thousand dollars to write an inventory database for us in Filemaker. Why wasn't this done years ago? THEY DIDN'T KNOW IT COULD BE DONE!!! If you want to make a good living, and can write accounting software, cold call businesses in your area, and tell them:
"I can make the computer work the way YOU want it to work, not make you work the way that off the shelf software wants you to work."
You will make the sale, and you can reuse your code on the next project.
Why don't I do it? I have a job I like more, that pays enough to keep me in all the toys I want.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I am starting to think this guy has a bot that posts theses and then looks for replys that he can pounce on.
Seriously. If those facts were correct, then the people (all but one) I have worked for in the past must be unable to add. They saved a bunch on Unix, then linux. Less hardware, less people to maintain, less downtime (less pissed off customers). List goes on. MS may have purchased some fancy science-like surveys, but as I said before, 2 out of 3 dentists surveyed say they use .... (in 1 out of 20 surveys)
Cripes, I think Family Feud has a more accurate survey system than most stuff I read backed by MS.
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
We want Linux and OpenOffice on every desktop. We want to be able to access customer data from a variety of clients, even including Windows. The same goes for Accounting data, HR data, QA data, you name it. Do we have to write our own system from scratch? I'm not sure that is very realistic."
It seems to me that you need to figure out why you want to use OSS because if you hinder the business unit's ability to interact with clients (internal and external) you're not going to be in business long enough for it to matter. Find the right and best product for the job regardless of whether it's open or closed.
What he's ticked about is having to put Windows on every desktop because the client end only works on IE (guh!).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Hehe ! That's a REEEAL profesionnal...
Is he Gilderoy Lockart cousin or something &
Then we might be more willing to listen to you.
Open for Business rocks! Whether or not it's complete depends on what you need, obviously.
Hyperic Community Manager
Number one most places put linux in the wrong places at first. Linux makes a good webserver and fileserver also clusters like heck when you need it ie boot cds in the desktop machines at night alowing night time processing of large data. Replace fileservers and webservers first after that stage is complete look at replacing more as parts turnup. Don't forget that linux based Sqls can be used from windows software in place of microsoft SQL server.
People forget that linux can run smb shares by samba. You might have a domain controler or 2 being windows with 6 linux fileservers this is a huge cost saving.
Now there are places in every business that linux rocks. The trick is getting the tools to fit it and not installing Nvidia video cards lets just say something with Nothing from Nvidia is simpler to deal with.
How can you tell a microsoft fool they cannot even spell linux. Linux is not unix with a L.
The question is how can I make my servers make me more money do I rent them out to do video processing at night when I am not using them. Just business IT departments are the most wasteful department in some companys due to the fact that they are not prepared to mix and match to get the best price and performance. I do not say that linux does everything but mixed right no problems better performance less spam less virus trouble. Big thing is that when setup in server mode drop back to init 3/4 depending on setup this is a text mode removes the ram over head of running Xfree86(the graphical enviroment) So that as much power that the machine has can be giving to web/file/sql serving.
Insignificant to who? I don't know what kind of business you have, but to a lot of us those license costs are absolutely f'ing insane. I can take the money I would've spent on one copy of XP and pay for web hosting for a year. For the cost of one copy of Office I can build a really decent PC or buy a monitor. For the cost of MS Small Business Server I could build a network storage device.
I'm glad your business is so flush with cash that you can squander it on MS licenses, but some of the rest of us don't have that luxury.
Besides, if it came down to a choice between hiring someone and paying MS, I'd opt for spending the money on a real human being opposed to a faceless corporation that doesn't give a crap about me or them.
Buy, hey, I'm glad you can lay off people without a second thought. Doesn't matter as long as you have your condo in South Beach, right? Unfortunately I think about their wives, their kids and how long they might be out of work.
I'm glad you're okay with things, because in a cynical moment I might be tempted to think you're part of what's wrong with this country.
Asshole.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Dear sir,
If you had put your pretty license in the top, I could have saved reading your post. My mind is now corrupted with thoughts I may not even have rights to!
I am a consultant that started my own thing just about a year ago. I do a lot of day-to-day Windows stuff, but internally run SUSE on just about everything and my wife has a Powerbook.
We use Quickbooks 2003 for accounting. Works well, fairly easy to use for my non-accounting brain. What I did to accomplish this was to run a Windows 2000 Server basically as a terminal server to allow either one of us to use Quickbooks on our boxes. I had the firewall forwarded so my accountant could get into it as well. They key is not to use the box for anything else, no web browsing, no e-mail, no nothing. Keep it patched, toss on a copy of Symantec antivirus, install the free version of SFU and you can back it up over the network on yer linux box. Seems to be the best way to "Windows-enable" your linux network.
I also run Mozilla mail against SUSE OpenExchange Server with great success and happiness. OpenExchange has an excellent web interface to mail as well as document management (with revision control), knowledgebase, contacts with contact history type functionality, job and project tracking (admittedly difficult to use), and internal instant messaging. Can sync yer Palm to it as well, or toss on Outlook with IMAP if you really have to. It's quite an excellent product and the pricing is quite reasonable considering what it can do. Doesn't need huge system resources either. I run it on dual a PIII-866 with 256MB right now--512MB would be quite sufficient. (swaps a bit with 256)
OpenOffice.Org runs on the SUSE desktops and the PowerBook has genuine MS Office X. She gets into some complex Excel formulas and macros so decided to go MS on that one. I have NO problem recommending OpenOffice.Org to anyone doing office tasks. If you gotta have support, go StarOffice from Sun--just as good, only a few bucks.
I haven't really gotten into any of the PHPProjekt-type wares. Seem to be a lot of functionality, but not much of it done up really well, and much less of it useful in and office setting. That groupware "killer app" is still lurking out there somewhere, if it's not the SUSE product.
Linux on the desktop is definately do-able. I do it here. My wife's old PC with XP crashed a few months ago--bought her the PowerBook and never thought about the Windows box again. All of your major tasks can be done on linux. I have an IBM X31 laptop and SUSE Pro 9.0 support all my hardware, including wireless network card and even some funky IBM stuff. I'm sure RedHat would be fine as well, especially on desktop systems--your preference.
The community will get better with accounting-type programs. I think it will probably still be a few years until something surfaces. The Win 2000 as terminal server should suffice until then, and it's not too expensive.
Good luck in your efforts, let us all know how you end up!
-m
http://www.invisik.com
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
If you think you have no time for any of this item or no bucks to pay for someone else to workout on what prevent you to use it, you may be happy with a commercial package you will pay someone to install with the great advantage to open an incident report or bug report when you will be stuck with it. Or open a design change request, hoping the software vendor will consider it in any coming release of his product.
There is no such thing like a free lunch!
Achille Talon
Hop!
Get some NCD XTerms that will render both Citrix and X11 side by side and your workstations will be set. Set up a NFS/Samba server so that everyones workspace can be unified and watch your TCO go down as you will only have to worry about a small handfull of servers and the desktops will be praticaly maintence free.
Accept that you can't be a COMPLETELY open source shop. It can't happen.
That said, take a look at Abas ERP http://www.abas.de/en/index.htm). The server runs on linux (or Windows, or HP-UX, or even AS/400 believe it or not) and the clients can run either windows/MS Office, or linux/Openoffice. It's a full featured ERP system, and is frankly pretty cheap. Dirt cheap. If you've priced ERP systems in the past, you'll be stunned.
If you're serious about going the "as open source as possible" route, give their Virginia office a call. Tell them then you heard about them from a large user in east Tennessee. If you think they're worth investigating further and want to see a business actually using it, I can arrange for you to tour my location and talk to my users.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Abas, but my company is a large customer.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Use good old IFF or ILBM.
Who knows how long BMP will last anyway? It would suck if Windows bit the bigone and Linux discontinued (or at least made uncommon) the BMP format.
IFF and ILBM have been around since the Jurassic period.
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org
Every time someone asks a question like this, you guys start spouting off software titles no one has ever heard of that you found in a search. What legitimate, recognizable companies are using only OS to run their business??
Have any of you actually used these programs? If you had, you would know that none of them individually or all together do what the guy was asking for:
"We want Linux and OpenOffice on every desktop. We want to be able to access customer data from a variety of clients, even including Windows. The same goes for Accounting data, HR data, QA data, you name it."
Good luck pal. A combination of crap that is integrated by a shoestring might do all these things, but they won't do it very well.
You can run your little "consulting" or lawnmower business or keep recipes with OS all you want, but just try it with a real business when SIGNIFICANT CAPITAL is involved.
Try not being able to make Payroll some time because your buggy Open Source apps blow up and you can't get anyone to fix it fast enough. No thanks.
Bottom line is that fanboy crowing about attempts at open source business software are a joke. Open Source Order Entry, Accounting, HR, Inventory, etc. titles pale in comparison to whats out there for Windows. There is no contest. Web servers? Sure. Firewalls? You bet. But business software? Nope.
The legitimate business world does not want the risk associated with dealing with one-man software outfits that "posture" as if they were a legitimate business. Nor do we want some fly-by-night piece of s--t that some teenagers wrote one night on a whim and decided to try to sell it before they drop it after graduation. We don't want to wait for emails from some bozo in Germany if we have an emergency with our systems.
Take your buggy (and frequently abandoned) "projects" and trade them with each other.
Me, I'll go the safe route and still be in business when you're back working at Best Buy.
OSS does not guarantee that you get the best software. I appreciate the argument that "if it doesn't meet your needs, you can modify it." Who does that? And do you scour source code and verify that it's doing things in the most secure manner possible? Blah, blah, blah. Use open source where it's prime-time: Server OS, Web server, LDAP, SMTP, *maybe* Java app server, database server. But buy a freakin' copy of quick books and move on.
James Prickett
> They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver.
What the hell is "Linux 7.0? "
--AROS is an Open Source AmigaOS clone, and source compatible with AmigaOS! Try the x86 build at http://www.aros.org
I remember hearing that Oracle are going to ensure that future products will all be Mozila compatible...~"~
I'm afraid for allot of businesses Linux is just not an option. We had a look at switching but couldn't, mainly because there were no quality accounting packages that would run on it.
Who ever said "risking your business was not worth the cost of the liscence fee", above was right, and it is a big reason why allot of small and medium sized companies can't switch.
note: we are based in Australia
VENI, VIDI, VICI, DIXI
We want Linux and OpenOffice on every desktop.
Then you don't want to run a business, you want to preach a crusade. And the two are mutually exclusive.
if you're referring to bookkeeping, then try sql-ledger.. i run mine on it!!
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
Freeside is exactly what you're looking for....check it out.
SAP
* Gives you all the functionality you asked for (and more).
* Server app runs on linux.
* Client UI runs is cross-platform (Java).
It's definitely not free but you said you're willing to pay for the platform..
I've investigated this same issue for a while and I would like to weigh in with the little I've gleaned: First, an observation: Separate notionally the idea of open source and the idea of running on linux/unix / not windows. Essentially, for the enterprise you need a robust Database product, easily achieved opensource via PostgreSQL or MySQL with a plethora of interface design tools available. Perhaps you would consider this bookmark: http://www.dbexperts.net/ Here you are not compromising anything by going opensource! Implement your own CRM in this environment. Open source is not there yet with an accounting package that you want to run your enterprise on. That does not mean you can't run your accounting on Unix/Linux and thereby eschew the Microsoft Domain. Until October 2003 the Silver bullet for enterprise accounting was Appgen. Alas they are in play. Refer to this website to get the latest dope. http://www.aaxnet.com/product/appgn.html This address is for a dedicated VAR who has been tracking the progress of the AppGen product. Worthwhile to click to his homepage while you're there. He speaks gospel. Finally, you need your office product, and since you are on slashdot I am confident you know about openoffice.org. I kind of wish they would make an open office "lite" commensurate with ThinkFree Office in code size, capability etc. because the full open office suite can be overwhelming for some management and clerical types (and even geeks who would rather use other tools to do the esoteric stuff.) Finally, for groupware, I find that although it is a content management system per se, Plone specifically and Zope generally can be used to inplement groupware via opensource. Otherwise use http://www.share360.com/index.cbml which keeps you off microsoft but accesible via Microsoft community. There are probably some great project management products coming online based on opensource. Til then you could demo this product for project management: http://www.webintellisys.com/index.html Hope this stimulates you to fulfill the goal of weaning the backoffice crew from Microsoft SQL, MAS 90, Solomon etc.
There are online services that provide that kind of functionality through web interfaces. the licensing is usually based on monthly service or usage based.
Good luck. I truly hope you can use some of this information. I am looking to do something of the same myself.
i sk.org/
http://www.bestpractical.com/
http://www.aster
http://www.ltsp.org/index.php
Same can be said for any business, VoIP or not. 95% of all customers use Windows. We use Mac OS X in house, Linux servers (hosted), and 1 lonely PC to run quickbooks. Also, for extra frustration, realize that 50-60% of that 95% are also on AOL... ;)
Filmo The Klown
Parent is absolutely right. I work at a medium sized accounting firm in Australia who use MYOB products mostly. MYOB, a huge commercial software company, had that many problems when the GST/BAS/etc was introduced (due to the ATO constantly changing laws) that many customers considered a class-action lawsuit. How do you expect the OSS community to keep up to date with all the ongoing legal changes?
have you tried NetSuite? It used to be called netledger, until Oracle bought them out. Now there's several products. all you need is a browser.
Depending on your timeframe, xrms might be a good choice for a CRM package. It's nearing a 1.0 release and eventually will integrate with many of the other apps mentioned here like SQL-Ledger. It's based on PHP running with MySQL or several other databases..
I'm actually in the process of installing xrms as a CRM from a support standpoint, not from a sales one. It has a nice user database, a basic ticketing system, and a fairly polished interface for a new app. It was one of the few that spanned both worlds (support vs. sales) with any finesse.
There are several developers involved that are happy to take suggestions and plan out new features.
In the Portland, Ore area and like card games? Check out: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/portlandgames/
There's a lot of good open source software out there. You might find several useful to your company. But I haven't found any really complete OSS business solutions that don't rely on proprietary software. Like that Compiere makes me wonder if it was made by Oracle just to attract customers.
Just remember that your ultimate goal is increasing profit, which is often helped by reducing expenditures but not always if it forces you to use something that's of lower quality. Most Linux projects have Windows ports, and chances are you're already running Windows, and your new PC's have it preinstalled accounting for $50 of the cost.
Don't shut out proprietary software but don't shut out Open Source either. Use whatever will lead to the best profits. You'll probably want at least one good Linux server for general purpose use. There are many good groupware related websites you can install on it for your intranet. OpenOffice works as well as MS Office for most tasks, sometimes better. If you use Microsoft Access, there aren't any OSS alternatives for running your preexisting Access apps, but you can find and download the little known free Access Runtime which works for most of them.
So to summarize, Windows desktops for compatibility, OSS software running on top, Linux servers wherever you're not locked in to Windows, and the free Access Runtime if you need Access but wish to use OpenOffice.
Nope. There's a port in the works, see this page. But, it's not in a useable form yet. We've been looking for a solution for our small-med size company ( LitigationDynamicsInc.com ) but have yet to find a single solution that be used to track our customer base and let the sales guys on windows see the same calendaring and customer data that the production (mac/pc) folks need to see. Everything seems close but no one project has everything yet. Ideally there'd be something that worked with ical, outlook, web, and palm and ran on macosx. Opengroupware is that product, but it's not quite there yet from the standpoint of running on X. I was able to play with it on a linux box, but it kept losing a connection to the database :P
PHPprojekt is close also and does run on 10.2+ but the developers are staunch in their refusal to support US-format date and time entry which is a deal-breaker for us.
I'm just wondering how easy it is for the administrative staff to use SQL Ledger. I looked at some of the screenshots and, while better than many OSS packages, it still looks much worse than say, Quickbooks, or Great Plains. Administrative staff being notoriously bad at using software, does this pose a problem for day to day activities such as sales order processing and accounts receivable?
Also, would an auditor or a lender have a problem with a business using an open source accounting package?
I don't know what no one has really talked about using both. If you want linux on the client use rdesktop to connect to a windows box with terminal services for the software you can't use on Linux or try CrossOver Office the other alternative is to have Windows on the client and use WinAxe or another X server to conenct to Linux. If you don't like thoes ideas you can also use Open Source Windows software
I don't necessarily agree with everything Micheal Moore says. However, I do agree with most of it...
Bush DID go AWOL...not that I care
Bush IS stupid... even his former secretary of treasury indicates it (note: I don't necessarily agree with a right winger like Justin Raimondo)
I agree with you that Bush is NOT a drug addict...
I also don't agree with the view that Bush stole the election... The Supreme Court decided it and if there is a problem, it lies with the courts...
Bush allegation, remember that after stripping away the humor, you're just reading the rantings of a religious fanatic. His religion is hatred.
I suppose in the upside world where Ann Coulter, Bill O'reilley and Rush Limbaugh preach love, Moore is preaching hatred...
Pushing this anti-Moore stunt precisely when the Bush administration is facing its biggest problems doesn't help you at all... A better stunt would be to revert to the classical 'anyone who criticizes the war is a traitor and a communist'. That stunt is more appropriate given what Bush is facing...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I've used GnuCash and I guess I would say (IMHO) "It's getting there". Its designed much like quicken and does many things in similar ways. I find, though, that I can still do more things in Quicken that I can in GnuCash. With enough development (and GnuCash hopefully moving someday to GTK2) the two programs will be equal. Also worth noting is that GnuCash will import a .qif file from Quicken so its easy to move over. If you're interested in it, I'd try it out.
Toying around with it, I can actually get Quicken to work in wine but it needs IE for some of its features and IE doesn't want to play along. Oh well.
IMO, browser-based interfaces lack in the usability front. They are simply not rich enough.
They work fine on the web because they are a compromise: I give you a site with a rather dull interface , but you get to it without installing custom software AND ALSO you are presented with a familiar and simple user interface (click links, scroll pages, fill up form fields, submit info), so you can catch on quickly with my site, because it work quite similarly to other sites you have visited before (an important aspect that some flash-based and some overworked DHTML-based sites seem to overlook).
Of course, the software used internally in a business has both more demands and less limitations.
It has less limitations because you can install wathever software you want (you have tech support, and don't depend on the end user failing to install the latest plugin). You don't have severe bandwidth limitations. You can standarize on a single platform for your clients, and on a single screen resolution (or, if it is not single, at least can be a known and definite set). You don't need to engineer your application to be run in a restrictive security sandbox, so you can have full control of the devices attached to your computer. For instance, you can make the application print an invoice as part of a transaction, without explicit user intervention (no "print" dialog), automatically selecting certain parameters (paper size, margins, resolution), not allowing the user to mess with them. The application you build can also have a steeper learning curve, because you won't have casual users (potential customers that have to figure out how things work on their own, and that you'll loose if they get annoyed), but permanent users that are your employees and can be trained.
The user interface of business software has higher demands too. If you fill in an online purchase form twice a week, you can put up with a clumsy user interface. But if that is your job, and you process purchase orders from 9 to 5, you'll need something better than the average HTML form. For instance, when a customer tells their name over the phone, you type the first three letters and a list of those customers that meet the citeria is instantly displayed for an easier selection. Also, you might want your text to be spell checked as you type when fou fill a text area. If you have used both SQL-Ledger and GNU cash, or PhpMyAdmin and mysqlcc, or any web-mail and any mail program, or groups.google.com and any newsreader then you should know what I'm talking about: even the best engineered web application falls short to almost all rich GUI applications.
Of course, in the future web interfaces might evolve to become richer (XForms, for intance), but until then, selecting a web-based architecture for internal business use certainly can hurt productivity.
Having said all this, I must also point out that it depends on what you call "a Browser-based application". I have taken for granted that the original poster meant a HTML-based application as opposed to, say, an application consisting in a single page containing a java applet or ActiveX control.
What institutions? Please, back this up with facts.
Oh wait, this is Mike Bouma, he doesn't need facts, he's an Amiga-fan!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
So I suppose you *could* say "It's more important for everything to be OSS, I guess we will just live without a [blank] system", but I'm not sure that's a valid business decision anymore.
You have created a false dilemna. You suggest there are only two options: non-OSS or nothing. That simply isn't true. All your talk about egg timers and burning money is also unwise. It is fairly obvious that the original poster should not just grab QuickBooks while s/he is at Walmart because it is convenient. Nor should a startup jump in with PeopleSoft or SAP or GnuCash, or anybody without a reasonably thorough investigation. Two or three days of waiting for Slashdot suggestions is a minor effort in the larger research.
The original poster is leary of building from scratch. I think that should be re-considered. Every off the shelf solution involves considerable "business process re-engineering." In other words, you have to force your business to work the way the software was built. Universities adopting Peoplesoft have found that they could not pay their faculty "9 over 12" because Peoplesoft wasn't built that way. Professors accustomed to working 9 months, but receiving paycheck all year long suddenly are forced into larger paydays for 9 months, then nothing for 3 months. Don't like it? Pay a lot of money to have the system modified, or do it yourself.
Ask Chevron how much in house programming it took to get SAP to allow vendor payment authorization the way Chevron had always done it before. Ask Fisher Price how many in house programmers it takes to get Keenan/Arbor to handle sales promotions that Keenan/Arbor didn't envision when they built the framework. Ask your local utility how much work it takes to tie your billing and provisioning together. See if they've even achieved it! It's pretty tough when you don't own the source. Oh yeah, and watch what happens when your vendor of choice releases an update to one of the modules. It wipes out all the "fixes" and customizations you have added. Don't cry to them. They can't possibly support every customer's customizations.
Now go ask Verio how five programmers can build a system from scratch that includes ordering, provisioning, and billing with global currency and pricing support in an amazing way that fits the company perfectly, while 200 hired experts struggle on to get a name-brand shrink-wrapped solution out of the planning stages. Granted, five full-time developers isn't cheap. But I can guarantee that no matter what you choose, you will need a team of developers to make it work. And when the solution is not homegrown, that team has to include highly paid outside "consultants."
Build your own system from scratch to fit your company. Don't build/rebuild your company to fit your system.
Oh, and about needing it to work on clients of many platforms... One word: Mozilla. It's a super nice client. From custom XUL apps to n-tier web apps, Mozilla is awesome! And it runs on more platforms than I can name. Of course, there aren't too many proprietary systems out there that have taken advantage of the platform advantages of Mozilla, but did I mention that you can build you own system?
Or... you could just outsource the whole thing to India.
Ever since I started getting those threatening postcards from the Business Software Alliance, I have been determined to do whatever I can to get Microsoft out of my business. It has not been easy at all. In fact, I wonder if my extreme hatred for Microsoft has clouded my business judgment.
My work has not been all for naught. I have easily and painlessly jettisoned Microsoft from all of our critical Internet infrastructure. No more Microsoft http servers, smtp servers, file servers, etc. This is where open source excels. It does not make much business sense to use Microsoft for stuff like this.
Another huge open source success is the use of Postgresql instead of Oracle or SQL Server. It was easy to re-program our proprietary apps to use Postgres. We save a ton of money by never paying for an Oracle license. Unless you can't live without DB clustering or other advanced features, Postgres is the answer.
My efforts to get rid of our proprietary point of sale/order entry system have taken me down a long, complicated road, and I have decided that the best solution is developing a completely custom system. This has cost a ton of time and money, and in two years has still not resulted in a functioning alternative or the decomissioning of a single Microsoft server! One day, though, I swear it will pay dividends. My stubborness here has so far been a big can of worms. But who knows, even massive, expensive fiascos like The Big Dig can one day "go live" and everybody is grateful.
OpenOffice is a no-brainer, unless you need to exchange documents with other firms, or you need some of MS Office's advanced features. My employees initially revolted (they were just not used to it). But OO is surprisingly feature-rich, if not intuitive or robust. Of course, even though OO has been a GREAT success story, it is still deployed on Windows machines. However, I now have a migration path to Linux workstations.
I do not even have any desire or plans to get rid of all the Microsoft boxes. We will still use Quickbooks for the back end accounting. We will still do desktop publishing using BSA-approved software (although the GIMP has replaced Photoshop in our non-print work).
The one shining beacon of hope for me is that, even though I have not significantly reduced the number of Windows machines at my business, I have significantly increased the number of FreeBSD and Linux servers, and I have not ever upgraded my Windows NT 4.0 workstation licenses!
My advice is to use OSS whereever you can, and proprietary software whereever you must. Always make technology decisions that give you the option to migrate to OSS if the option presents itself.
You hiring?
It was a super nice client until they introduced a bug that can't load the JVM properly.
Until, they fix this, I'll be using Opera.
I run a successful small Linux IT consultancy business. My clients tend to be small to medium sized professional services businesses. We have them setup on Linux servers running file, print, web, email, etc servers. Many customers have asked for CRM software. Most ultimately use ACT or Goldmine. This is unfortunate because both these softwares have no Linux based installs. I have looked at many OpenSource alternatives, all fall short, in fact all CRM's fall short. They are designed wrong in my opinion. We have an in-house application that we spent two weeks on that quite frankly is far superior to other projects i have seen, in concept if not in completion. It seems that many CRM's decide to be collaborative Outlook. I believe that most CRM software SHOULD be SALES driven. Meaning that the whole focus of most CRM's is to organize CUSTOMERS or potential customers. Anyway, maybe this is motivation to submit our in-house product (codenamed ConMan) to an OS download site.
no god is good
One of the strongest driving forces in certain more 'exotic' areas with regards OSS is companies paying developers to create GPL'd OSS software for them to use. If something you need doesn't exist, and you need it, and you're utterly bent on using OSS for perhaps financial security reasons, or similar, then this could be the route for you. It guarantees that your software will be free for ever more, and further that any improvements made by others will be yours to use too.
How would you suggest organizing and meeting the business client in order to initiate a project, perform analysis of business requirements, get consensus and sign-off on the business cases to be developed, report status, receive input from prototypes and user acceptance testing...the list goes on. A large company with a complex environment will most certainly rely on shared calendaring functionality. Not having this functionality available would definitely create a situation of wasted time & energy.
Since you believe online calendaring to be a "tool of the incompetent manager", how do you suggest management address the need to conveniently schedule you and everyone else's time to comunicate organizational issues? It would seem to me that you have an issue with the application of the tool and not the necessity of the tool itself.
While I know a completely OS env sounds great, don't tease yourself. If this is a business, only use OS where it can/should be used. Otherwise do what is needed.
Business is about money, and OS isn't always the best choice.
Quick-books can't properly handle multiple currencies whilst GnuCash seems to have no problems. You may have as many currencies as you want then balance them out at any time with a current or historical exchange rate. QB Professional is really not suitable for anything more than very simple stuff, it is closed and not extensible.
I have one suggestion, if you are going to compare all these suggestions everybody gave, it will be really valuable if you document the advantages/disadvantages of each in a spreadsheet and share that with the community. One of the major problems I find in open source software is that there is no comparison sheets, so picking up the right component is way too much RnD.
I wish there is a central place people can post evaluation and comments on of various categories of open source software.
What sort of needs does a big business have? Well, they all need to manage human resources. Most need to track items in their warehouses and perhaps training for their employees. The industrial sector will have many additional needs to track equipment, schedule resources, control work authorizations, and safely take equipment in and out of service. Running an enterprise call system also takes more than a PHP app.
There are dozens of other highly generic needs that I haven't mentioned, but all take extensive effort to set up, customize, and integrate into a business environment. And these things are *mission critical*: millions of dollars can ride on the availability of the software. Open source can eventually get here, but it will have to (first) be written, (second) creep up through small business, and (third) be vetted and pushed by consultants who can make money from long-standing service contracts.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic about open source, but there are many unmet needs here. Don't expect to run a serious business without proprietary software. In fact, be as objective as possible when evaluating software needs for your business... pretend that you have to defend every decision in front of someone who doesn't care about the distiction b/t free and non-free software. Someone who only thinks in terms of money, growth potiential, implementation schedules, and risk. If OSS can't stand its ground here (even with the price advantage), drop it. Don't jeporadize your business, and (if you're working for someone else) don't give your boss a bad taste of what OSS is all about.
Stallman--as much as I support the guy--completely misses the real world when he says that "any business based on proprietary software deserves to fail". Deserving or not, any medium or large business that is not based on proprietary software will fail.
I hope open source can one day address these needs, especially for small businesses and start-ups, but I'm not too worried even if it can't. If Linux becomes good enough in other aspects, these proprietary apps will be made to run on Linux too (and some of them already do). "Mostly" free is good enough for me.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
2 words for all of you "Ernie Ball". As a musician, I use Ernie Ball Stainless steel strings exclusively for any of my electric git fiddles. From the 5 6 strings, 3 7 strings, and the 12 string.
I don't know if any of you recall reading about this, but
slashdot
dot com dot com dot com dot com
Ernie Ball makes some of the finest guitars, and related equipment you can find. If he can do it, so can ANYONE else. They weren't a "geek" shop like most readers here. Granted, I wouldn't take chances on finances with "untested" software, but damnit, it's obvious it can be done. He has to buy everything, manufacture it (guitars made by hand I might add), then sell it. I'd say he has finances he has to worry about. I mean, employees, parts, tools, then when I plop my $1800+ down for a high quality axe or strings.
bugger off those that say it can't be done.
Mozialla Firebird 0.7 has been crashing on me for some reason (it crashes once or twice a day, of heavy use). I think it may be related to the java plug-in and not the browser (I hate java--not the programming lanaguage but how Sun implements their APIs and stuff). Not sure what the cause is yet.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Has anyone here tried GnuCash?
[Raises hand]
I don't have accounting complicated enough make it worthwhile using accounting software, but I do wonder how it stacks up compared to Quicken
GnuCash is hands down better for a business than Quicken. IMO, it looks much better for business work than Quicken's big brother, QuickBooks. I have some experience setting up QuickBooks and Peachtree accounting systems for mom & pop businesses, and I've run my personal accounting on one version or another of Quickbooks for about 10 years now. I've just changed over to GnuCash at the beginning of the year, as I'm migrating to Linux.
GnuCash is a full-fledged double-entry accounting system with good audit capability (burn a standard General Ledger to CD every end of month, etc), good report features, and by reputation good A/R, A/P, tax, and payroll capabilities (It pleases me that I don't have to explore those myself.) Also by reputation, its customer and vendor tracking is pretty thorough. It also has very good support for online banking and highly regarded multi-currency handling. And since it is GPL, if extensions are needed you could hire a tame programmer to do them (and use the world to beta test his product).
I'd suggest thoroughly exploring GnuCash and using it as a standard to measure other possible accounting systems against. I think it likely that you'd end up choosing GnuCash when all is said and done.
You'd need another database for the non-financial aspects of tending your customers. There are advantages in keeping technical support history, etc, separate from the financial history. At a WAG, I'd bet that one of the Help Desk packages would handle all of the most important parts of this for a VoIP provider. I haven't explored OS Help Desk databases, but I would think there would be some good ones available now.
I think OOo, GnuCash, and some GPL'd Help Desk database would cover most of your software needs. And in Linux, to boot. That will carve your potential licensing and support costs down quite a bit.
Does the solution really need to be open source or just something that is platform independant? If it is the latter, have you thought about SAP? While I don't know exactly all of the platforms that they run on, they do offer an ASP solution.
If you a worried about price, however, look somewhere else!
I'm not prejudiced. I hate everyone equally.
"I want professional software"
"I Don't Wan't to Pay for it"
"Why aren't you guys writing all of this for free for me???"
ha!
www.Beyond7.com Insane modern art water sculpture.
Running a business based around open source software is like running a car on fumes
GnuCash isn't suited for business because it does not really use true double-accounting....Because of that, compared to Quicken it sucks and is totally unusuable for a business.
Please mod parent down into oblivion.
GnuCash is a double entry accounting system.
Quickbooks is a double entry accounting system.
Quicken, though, is a glorified checkbook register program, not an accounting system.
Whatever you do in the end, don't make the same mistake that tech-oriented people always make. Namely, putting the technology ahead of the business. There is no point of using OSS just because you want to. What comes first is the business. What is best for the business? If it is Windows, that's what you should go with. If OSS works out better, that's what you should use. Also, don't forget that you can have a mix. For example, you can use some Windows software for the business process tasks (say CRM or something) but use linux (openoffice,etc) for basic desktop use. Depending on what you need, you can pull your customer data from the Windows database (say MySQL, or MS SQL Server, or Oracle) into a linux application (this depends on what your final business software allows).
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
I have had a number of small businesses profit and non-profit run on MOYB. I had tried Quickbooks and SBT. MYOB is smooth and beautiful and flexible --- multi-level categies for Balance Sheet/Income Statement, etc.
Quicken always seemed to be the "Oracle" of the accounting software world - lots of marketing.
Of course, there's a possibility to write your own system using OOo-basic. I just started myself, taking over an existing company with 8 employees. For CRM they use perfectview, a database-app. They also create bills and offerings in Perfectview. Accounting is done in exact. Both programs don't work together, soI tried switching over to OSS but didn't find any replacement for perfectview. So eventually I had to buy a license for exact and 8 licenses for perfectview. I tried creating a database-app in OOo-basic (I like it to run as a standalone-app) but the time it takes (and time=money) to write this kind of app doesn't compare to buying the licenses. Also, there's the advantage of updates whenever tax-laws change etc etc. It's easy to determine it's cheaper to buy exact then to write your own system. The same holds for window-licenses. As everyone knows how windows works, it'll cost you a lot switching over. Then it's cheaper to stick with windows. Now I decided to use my spare time to redesign the business based op OSS, but most important is: investigate how much time it will cost to switch the habits of people and compare that to the cost of licenses!!! gr Bas
Doesn't imply excluding Linux. However, that's really neither here nor there. The real meat of the issue is that, like it or not, Windows is the OS of bussiness. Regardless of what runs the servers and back ends, Windows is what the managers and sales people at 99.99% of companies use, so you'd best support it.
The best example of this I have seen is at my current job, as support for a university Electrical and Computer Engineering department. Now, what with being an engineering place, we've got loads of UNIX systems as you'd expect. Lots of Windows systems too (since professors like them and since there is much software that is WIn only) but tons of UNIX stuff and Linux as well. Well today I was instructed to setup a new computer for the presentation room. This hooks to teh projector and is what companies and grant foundations use to make presentations to us, and vice versa.
So, what is it? It's a Windows XP PC, with MS Office 2003. No emulators, no Wine, normal Windows running Office. Why? Well because when the presenters come in with their USB key drives with Power Point and/or Word presentations on them they just want it to work. No BS about loading an emulator, no BS about incompatibilities, just having their presentation happen form the word go.
Now people here might legitmately wonder, what about if their presentation is in another format? What then? Well guess what? It NEVER is. MS Office is the universal format that is used, even among the engineers.
May seem silly, but that's how it goes.
Funny, Java seems to be working both in Mozilla 1.6 and Firebird .7. Maybe you need to upgrade your version of Java?
No offense but that's bad advice. His company's main business is VOIP--not writing software. Some of the things that he requires will be very complicated (eg. CRM, SRM, etc). It will take a lot of resources & time to write something that he requires. It will be far cheaper to purchase some off-the-shelf package for a few hundread or few thousand (depends on what you need) than to develop something.
In any case, regardless of costs & time, one should focus on their core competency. In this case, it's going to be VOIP. This company will live and die by that. Whether they develop an amazing internal application is irrelevant (assuming you can find some off the shelf package to suit the company). Instead of wasting time developing this software, the company should be spending time on VOIP issues and how to beat the competition. Every minute and every dollar spent on something other than the core competency (VOIP) is a waste.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Any serious SQL based piece of software...
You might feel it's not serious software, but SAP runs on MySQL, for example.
I'm not so sure about your stored procedure statement, either. If you're trying to develop batabase agnostic software, a reasonable approach is to avoid stored procedures. At least, until there's a widely implemented cross-database stored procedure language, that's a reasonable approach.
At the same time, though, it's often easier to just say "Sure, let's use MS SQL," go with the flow, and collect your check. It beats working on open software with pride while collecting unemployment. Part of some people's resistance to switching databases may have to do with their perceived investment in having people trained in a particular product (like MS Sql Server) and having relationships and support infrastructure in place.
This is a good post. I agree with everything he/she says.... This post nicely sums up the state of CRM/SRM/etc open-source software...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
From watching the Bowling for Columbine documentary here in Brazil, the first impression most people got was "hey, at least many Americans aren't the selfish, oppressing, self-righteous fans of double standards that Bush and their media led me to believe! Some Americans aren't blind to all this!"
In a time where the US is enjoying its lowest international popularity ever, having someone like Michael Moore as a public figure is doing more for USA's positive image than anything Bush ever did.
And yes, Bush is indeed stupid. The whole world sees it, and the only ones that don't are the ones that want things to go their way regardless of what's fair and right.
WTF is with all the attempted lessons on business management doing in an article where the author specifically asked for OSS solutions to a particular business issue for a particular business model!!!?!
You folks are no better than spammers clogging up the discussions with your attempts to steer the asker "straight" with your lame ass advice to pony up to commercial vendors!
Its like some guy asked which Pepsi machine to use for his new coin-op business and was crapflooded with a bunch of folks who love Coke. IOW, poster wasn't asking for help with the Business Model, hello!?!
Maybe the model of pasting Made with OSS on the product will be no more effective than Harley's Made in USA, but let them try their business model and give them the advice they asked for rather than carpflood the discussion with borderline SPAM about commercial products.
While OpenMFG (www.openmfg.com) is not itself open source, it is built of 100% OSS components (PostgreSQL, QT) . And it's a lot more polished than currently available OSS packages. If you want CRM/ERP/Accounting that's better than Compiere, then it may be the choice for you.
HOWEVER, one thing you'll notice is that most OSS or OSS-built software for CRM+Accounting is oriented around the manufacturing industry. There is very little for the service or licensed professional industry. This is becuase in the US, manufacturers have led the adoption of open source and tend to be a lot more DIY about software than other businesses.
You *could* build something yourself, starting with SQL Ledger. I've done this professionally; it will cost about $150,000 and take one to two years. This will give you a system that is custom-tailored to your business, as well as a potential backup line of income when your main VoIP business collapses. But it will most likely play hell with your rollout schedule.
This is fundamentally boring stuff, but easy to get wrong, with potentially disastrous consequences. So, instead of shelling out big bucks for 'COTS'-ware, violating your own IT policies, and costing you an additional bag of appendages for the consulting work necessary to get it running, I'd rather buy this as a service.
;)
Incidentally, I work for a company that sells that kind of service (not in the US, though, but it's a rather obvious business model, so there will be someone in your area for sure). To give you an idea: we handle over 200 million calls a month (order management, provisioning, rating, billing, invoicing, payment handling, dunning, customer care, call-center support, the whole chain) using a near-FOSS system that we built and run in-house. The only proprietary components are IBM DB2 and the Sun JDK.
For lowish transaction volumes, we can afford to be cheaper than a bare software license, and as an added benefit we know what we're doing, so your auditors will be happier, too. So, go and find one of our competitors.
Nope, never been documented. Pure rumor.
Would you like to by a bridge?
Troll... Go back to your hole.
If so they are everywhere
Two years ago I would have heartily recommended using an IBM Midrange server : iSeries with traditional tools. The internet exterior can be undertaken with an open source toolset as it is newer technology.
The commercial problems you mention are vast and complex but well understood by blue chip IBM customers, and have taken continuous, steady evolution since the 60s to address : payroll, accounting, tax, CRM, total cost of ownership, reliability, scaleability (not just disk/memory capacity but system management tools).
The internet interface/order capture part of the equation is probably the least important aspect about setting up a reliable, secure, cost-effective data-processing operation.
Although not a solution to run inhouse it does keep out a lot of other OS'es. completely webbased. I only checked out the free version which seem to work fine with Mozilla. Forget for now the accounts receivable part though :-)
maybe the American lunar expedition did not leave Hollywood at all.
Dunno whether it's any good, though, or whether the buyout by Sage will affect anything.
http://www.erp5.org/linux.html
You might see if you can contact the folks at Ernie Ball.m l?tag=l h
See older story here:
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.ht
- I am made of meat.
LAMP.
..... though it probably will result in something like what happens if you misuse IPC::Open2 :-/
Linux - a popular operating system; basically, Unix rewritten from the gound up.
Apache - the Web server; Apache is to httpd as Coke is to caffeinated beverage with plant extracts.
MySQL - it's free, it's fast and it's robust. It doesn't crash and corrupt its own tables.
Pick any scripting language you like; it could be Perl, PHP or Python. Whichever you're most comfortable with.
Use exim for your on-site mail server, dire warnings notwithstanding, because it runs just fine on Linux if you have plenty of RAM. Linux reads back transparently from disk cache, so it doesn't have to decache before it can read stuff, unlike certain operating systems. Exim can easily be configured to talk to an upstream SMTP server, which probably is what you want with an ordinary ADSL connection. Its configuration file is less unfriendly than Sendmail's one. Make sure your mail host can insert envelope-to headers {if they are running exim, which does, so much the better; otherwise refer them to Sendmail FAQ 3.29} so you send the right message to the right user. To complete the mail route to the desktop, you'll probably need a pop3 server; Debian default is Qpopper but anything will do.
You could maybe add a news server -- news is what people used to think the Internet was before the advent of the World Wide Web. With a HTML-aware newsreader, you can do Real Fun Stuff.
Create a company policy forbidding the importation of binaries: all binaries run on any company-owned computers are to be compiled from source on a company-owned computer. Unfortunately, you'll have to make a short term exception for the kernel and gcc. Be interesting to see what software vendors say to that one
And lastly, never forget that it is entirely possible to do most, if not all, common business tasks without the use of a computer at all. If you really care about not using Closed Source software AT ALL, then consider using Traditional Methods. You might even get in the newspapers, and that would be a great opportunity to plug your Cause. {Actually, if you really wanted to make the news, you could arrange for somebody to make an 'anonymous tip-off' to FAST or someone. But even if you know you're clean, surviving a bust can be pretty hairy. Absolutely don't even think about this if you have any Closed Source software on the premises.}
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
And you have $4 million that's straight off the bottom line, say your business is 10% profitable and that's $40 million in sales that you don't have to make to generate the same amount of profit.
Looking at MS solutions on an individual basis it certainly looks like a good idea "Hey it's only a thousand dollars" except it isn't only a thousand dollars. It's a thousand dollars multiplied by the number of times you have to implement it and to give MS credit, that's a linear increase in their revenue.
Open source systems on the other hand costs tend to scale logarithmically, assuming your IT guys are competent. The difference at the small scale isn't particularly compelling but as your business grows it becomes very very significant.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
In an OSS environment you can use windows apps.
Set up one Windows server with Citrix Metaframe, install the needed Windows applications and share them seamlessly to the users desktops using Citrix. There is a Citrix ICA client available for Linux and it works well.
This should solve your problems without having to change the user environment to windows.
highley trained profesinal my ass.. mike, the best words that describe you are "fucking moron." Funny too, you have a company that reflects that. (IE a failed one, you goddamn retard.
-Polyhead-
For anyone who think the poster is someone else than it is. Notice the spelling of the last name: Bourna, Bou R N a.
A deal breaker? Please, you should be ashamed of yourselves, as should all Americans! Honestly, how long can we continue to go on writing our dates backwards? It's so embarassing...
Personally, I'd do business with a company that wrote their dates CORRECTLY over one that didn't any day.
But in this discussion, I'd think it'd be very informative to find out how Sun, Apple, Oracle and other publicly avowed Microsoft dislikers run their business? Surely they, more than anybody else, has a business strategy at all levels to use non-MS products for their business operations, preferably their own.
Clearly, Apple, Sun and so on use MS in various parts of their organisation. They'd be unable to develop their products without MS systems, but across the organisation as a whole, what do they use for all of the problems you describe?
I've heard stories of Sun types pulling out Windows laptops and getting tuts from the techies in the room, but that was a few years ago, prior to StarOffice...
So, anybody know what these guys use?
ooooooh! What does this button do? - DeeDee, Dexters Lab.
heh, gnucash most certainly does use double accounting... has for some time now... your "note" disqualified your entire post from worthwileness because a quick trip to *gasp* google shows that you're an idiot
And, no, I should not have used the goddamn Preview mode first.
I agree completely.
It's by seeing Moore that at least it gets clear that not all americans are arrogant, self-indulging, egocentric warmongers who use double standards and think they can boss around the entire world.
If you aren't selling it, are you thinking of opening some or all of it?
LOL, always interesting to see Amigas rivals, like Genesi employees making such trolling statements.
The fake Mike BouRNa handle isnt used by me.
If you were looking at Compiere... have a look at http://www.ossuite.org/erp.php
/contributed to oscommerce. Not a fully fledged erp but bloody great if you're on a shoestring!
It's by the guys who built
We - a small group of freelancers that I've managed to gather - are building an ERP infrastructure for a small local E-Commerce business, with Billing, Supply Chain Management and some other stuff joinging the mix almost right on site with one of our clients. :-) really is worth it.
l )
From what I have expierienced, even with finacial and CRM software is that it in the end even isn't worthwhile looking at commercial proprietary software.
My strong advice:
Get an OSS expierienced programmer who is realistic and can ask you the right questions. He absolutely has to be capable of understanding the needs of pragmatic business solutions and your need to also evalutate proprietary products even if he's grown to be very sceptical (like I have). He should also be able to recognize where the bottlenecks in your business are and if the software which screenshots you like so much
We are using OSS all the way through, exept for the businessguy who hasn't gotten around to ditching his Win2K Desktop - which he almost is as anoyed about as the rest of us, since managing all those emails is a major suck with outlook. (Yeah, I know, sounds insane, doesn't it?)
All the rest is done with either solid OSS solutions - in this case InterChange for the e-Commerce plattform - or custom Code in Python.
Compiere gives me the creeps aswell, but just the other day I've checked with the GNU Enterprise team, and after pocking them with questions on IRC for 90 minutes I'd say their foundation work seems the way to go for me. Take a look for yourself:
( http://www.gnu.org/software/gnue/project/what.htm
Just now the business has it's model sorted out and we're making the transition from a bunch of patched and modded gluecode scripts to a front line ERP/SCM/CRM system and we are going to join the GNUe folks, contribute to the project and use the gnue-common stuff to build the precise things we need. It may be a struggle at times, but all in all the crap we've put up with in proprietary systems we've shurely had enough of.
I don't know your field of business, but _if_ you choose to use proprietary software I'd suggest you do thourough evaluation of in-the-field qualities and take a VERY close look at true TCO.
Remeber: THIS is the area we're the software vendors move into serious bullshitting territory in a way that in comparsion one could think the MS Desktop devision is a trustworthy non-profit organization!
Bottom Line:
If you have good and solid, non-quirky fanatics-free OSS coders and experts at hand I'd suggest you trust them with your money, otherwise be _extremely_ carefull before you buy yourself into a lock-in with a crappy line of software products. You can't imagine what proprietary rubbish people sell for money.
BTW: If you happen to reside in germany or benelux, I'd be happy to have a talk and look if I can maybe be of use and able to toss you a pitch. Feel free to drop me a line if you think I can help you.
(Here's my public mailbox: r_i-t_s-c_h-r_a-t_s-c_h @ g-m_x-_-. d_-_e without the Hyphens, Spaces and Underscores)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Have you looked into ASPs? Salesforce.com is serving enough small and mid-sized businesses now that Seibel (and I believe Oracle) are getting into the app service business. I don't know what is available for accounting, but I would expect you can get SAP with this model. I hope they are not all IE bound. If you don't have a lot of users, the costs (~$500-$1,000) per might not be much more than rolling your own. On the other hand, it is still a little scary to trust critical data to these outfits.
It was, wasn't it?
Ask Microsoft, IBM, and Redhat. Compare, contrast, and then ask them AGAIN now that you really know the specifics. Then choose a PATH that is right for you. Not choose a final solution; no, there is no final solution; only what to do NEXT.
And for you what is next is to ask people that have done this a thousand times already: Microsoft, IBM, and Redhat.
(According to the Bible even God makes deals with the devil.)
We had a related problem, although in a smaller way.
Our core business software requires Windows on client machines and MS SQL Server. Since, the database is SQL, we can query it to extract information directly while sending all inputs through Windows front end client. In order to make the information in the database available to our Linux intranet webserver we built a SOAP layer between the MS SQL Server and webserver.
The SOAP layer consists of a SOAP server, written in Delphi. The SOAP server comprises a core and .dlls that handle requests for different services. A dll can be written to execute specific queries and return the results or provide a generic SQL functionality which is OK for small result sets.
At the webserver end, we use cgi programs, written in Kylix or Python, which call method made avaialble by the SOAP server and its modules. For Kylix, we have a SOAPSQLQuery component that can be used rather like and other Delphi/Kylix dataset components.
This means that we can use information from the database to provide access to information via web browsers on desktops running Windows or Linux.
The SOAP server is now used for all database access, irrespective of the OS of the querying machine, to provide flexibility for the future. For example, Word and a Word add-in that gets name and address info for letters can easily be replaced by OpenOffice on Linux and a Java component because the actual database access is performed by the SOAP server and the SOAP interface is constant and simple to use.
I've used TUTOS and it looks great from the user side, but I don't like the code at all. I set it up for a small manufacturing company and then imported all of there customer data into it. It can't handle the dataset. If you do a search for companies that returns too many items then you get an out of memory error, even though it only displays 10 or so at a time, and doesn't return any results.
Adding new entries is semi time-consuming as well and it tooks some time for the users to really grasp what was going on. There needs toi be an entry screen that'll let you setup a company/address/location all from one screen for first time contacts with a company, then add pieces later as well.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Read the whole sentence.
He said, "It's not like you can read the source AND KNOW WHAT THE CLIENT'S PRIVATE DATA IS"
Using smaller words: Being able to read the source doesn't compromise the privacy of the system. This is in response to the claim that private data shouldn't be stored on open source systems.
Never confuse volume with power.
His company manufactures guitar strings. They switched from entirely Windows to entirely Linux in less than a year. Try contacting him to get some guidance.
Sounds like there may be a market for it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
You should take a look at Modernbill
I've used this before within a small ISP and it was pretty good.
....move along....nothing to see here....
What about PeopleSoft? They have packages to handle HR, Financial, and HelpDesk functions. The server side can run on Unix or Windows with Oracle or MS SQL Server. The client is web-based and is supposed to be (according to PeopleSoft's documentation) fully functional on Netscape 4.7. Don't get me wrong, it will be expensive to implement, but depending on the number of workstations you have, it may be cheaper than putting Windows on all of them.
Rockin' On Without Microsoft
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
If this is an open-source project, why not check out the source code and see if you can hire someone to change the date entry module?
If there's already a centralized routine they use to parse dates, it might only be a few hours' work. If they parse dates throughout the program, changing all the major screens that deal with dates isn't going to take that long. Write a single function to do it, put it in the common functions area, and then call it every time dates are entered. Dull to implement, but fast and oh-so-useful.
Hope that helps.
D
I used to work for a real estate company in Central Illinois and I Feel Your Pain. The brokers/agents all used weird proprietary apps for different things that wouldn't work together (Win9x era, so they all used different .dlls, with the same names) and would freak out at the idea that they couldn't use their expensive new toys. The local board had the MLS setup so it was accessible only through an expensive front-end to telnet (basically), not a web browser. Then we merged with another company and eventually changed which national company we were franchises of, which led to a whole new set of expensive crap being shoved down our throats.
Then there was working with the agents themselves. I can deal with people who are scared of computers, unless it comes to randomly downloading stuff and opening every e-mail attachment, but the ones who made Annette Benning's character in _American Beauty_ seem rational...
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
You can start with a great LAM(p) Application. Linux->Apache->MySQL->Perl (I know..it's supposed to be PHP). PerlBill has a really good framework for orders and customer tracking, but with any software application for business, it may need some hacking. Since it is Perl, that can easily be done, and there is a network of hackers that can help in your customization. When all else fails, if you have to use Windows Products, please install Crossover Office on a Linux System instead of maintaining another petrie dish. (MS Windows is a place to grow viruses).
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
If you're talking about a large number of customers making VOIP calls, then you probably need a balance-forward billing system rather than a classic double-entry system. For those not in the know, a balance-forward system is like your credit card bill where charges and payments do not necessarily match.
Has anybody spotted a *working* general purpose balance-forward billing system composed of FOSS software?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
For an open source web shop check out osCommerce. We use it at work to run two online shops. It uses a MySQL backend and has an active community supporting it.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I know other people have mentioned this Open Source project in other posts, but I wanted to highlight it to make sure it was seen. I've been using OpenOffice.org myself for about 2 years and have been very happy with it.
I was looking for just such a list myself :)
Web-ERP is another option. I have only installed it, never actually used it. It has a nice GUI and it is all web-based.
"not working properly with Mozilla is another (you need IE to use it fully in HTML mode)"
1st, the enviornment:
i work with iso-8583 requirements, and a sales staff that wants quick and dirty software demos in under 30 minutes.
i've worked with mozilla for over a year using such things as https, ssi, and perl interfacing to the win32 world. all with success.
2nd, the question(s):
1. what is it that IE can do that Mozilla cannot ?
2. which version of HTML are you working with?
regards,
LifesABeach
Had a service call a month or so ago where a small
office had one of their secretaries change the password
after being fired.
Did you know you have to send a copy of your entire
quicken database to them to recover the password?
Fucking stupid, Look folks, lock the MACHINES down, not the fucking DATA!
Shitheads.
GNUCash the whole way!!!
Okay, I'll wade in here.
.: Huge pain in the ass time commitment for what? The hopes of better integration.... never happened too many other $$$ producing things to do.
I've been working as a CFO/Marketing/Sales/IT guy for the last 2 years at small business. What I've learned has been invaluable.
1. No one cares what it is or does, they only care about two things: How Much Time will it take, How much will it cost, and how much will it save (time or money).
So thinking about it from that perspective Here's the dump:
We use FileMaker 5.0 as our database. It blows, looses data all the time, but it was very easy to setup for the Ex-Marketing guy. To recreate those forms and ease of entry would take a couple man-weeks in PHP and MYSQL, and you'd still have all the web lag (and even then people forgot to save their changes all the time). Perl/TK would be the way to go... but talk about a night mare rolling that out to windows clients/etc.
Accounting software -> We're on Quickbooks 2004 Premier. Why? That's what our accountant uses and its a heck of a lot cheaper then other alternatives ($4k + each). However, we have a european office that we need to merge our financials for reporting purposes. The board likes graphs/different tables/ratios then quickbooks will print.. Yup its called Excel. OH, you can't pull anything out of quickbooks very easily (lockin). Open Source alternatives (the accountant is not very computer literate... so that's a no go there). not to mention porting 13 years of back data in Access/Quickbooks to an open source accounting package? How the heck to you do that? Yup, by hand. Way too much time for little benifit.
So, if you start from scratch and you can use OSS tools, then yeah... knock yourself out and build enterprise class tools in your spare time (assuming you have the background). Most business types don't... they care about bringing in revenue, and cutting their costs. Integration is great you and I all know what it means... But unless you have a big budget and time to muck around its not going to happen. After all time is money.
Got to run.... I need to make my sales numbers for the month.
Solution:
- Geeks unite and create super easy to install/linux distributions for businesses with all of the tools integrated. That will be the beast that kills Windows (Heck, the Microsoft guy wanted $75-100k to do the integration that I could do in linux... but it'd take me ~ 4 - 6 man weeks... the benifits weren't compelling enough for the powers that be. But if it'd take 1-2 days then bam... Microsoft would loose a lot of small businesses, because that's a cost many would jump on for the efficiencies.)
-Random MBA/X-Microprocessor designer
There have been lots of posts on this thread suggesting various software packages and many of these may offer some or all of what your business needs. However, if you find that there is one application that you need to use that is only available for Windows, there is nothing sinful about having a pet Windows box on your LAN just to run that app.
For years I had a pet Windoes box on the LAN just for the scanner and camera interface. Just make sure you're using it as an optional acessory and if it goes down it won't take your business with it. Remove unnecessary applications like Outlook and keep the installation as simple as possible.
Alternatively, you may very well find commercial software for Solaris that will do more than everything you want better than the equivalent Windows-ware - and have you seen how cheap Solaris boxes are on ebay? It is also possible to include a Mac on your LAN, since many companies offer a Mac variant of Windows-ware.
I would also suggest checking out a company called Celestial Systems (hhtp://www.celestial.com) which offers some very interesting solutions for business issues.
Maybe if by some miracle we could just change to a national sales/use tax....or flat tax to make it simple and easy we'd solve these problems in one fell swoop...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If the majority of your applications are for Linux, but you need Windows for a few, you should use a solution such as Citrix. Other similar solutions include Windows RTP, VNC, and VMWare. Clients for all of these will work on Linux.
Another point I'd make is that you can run many Open Source applications on Windows. Open Office will definitely run on Windows, and saves you from the Microsoft Office licensing beast.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
We've been using Open For Business (http://www.ofbiz.org) and it has been very good indeed. It is still work in progress but there are lots of stable elements to it and it supports a range of databases (Postgres being our choice). We are setting up a retail support operation based entirely on open source software and this is our core component. It is a J2EE/xml solution with a fairly high initial learning curve but there is good support and it is very stable. ;) ).
We also use SQL-Ledger which is very good although we haven't done the integration yet (which should be fun
OFBiz has an entity engine so that you can write once for at least 10 different databases. It eschews the EJB and bean design for a more proficient service oriented architecture. It has integerated JPublish and FreeMarker for UI dev - a big improvement over JSPs (which are still available). It has built-in engines for processflow, SOAP and more. Services and actions can be written Java, Beanshell or a highly leveraged XML-based scripting language. The whole system uses industry-standard best practices and patterns where applicable.
And if OFBiz were not simply phenomenal as a dev platform, it comes out of the box with industrial strength ecommerce, many ERP modules, content management and third parties are starting to add many more.
OFBiz is "genius in a bottle".
Ah, sorry for that. I was rather puzzled by the single lack of mentioning AmigaDE/AmigaAnywhere/AmigaGen2 in the comment.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
The web runs on servers which gather statistics from HTTP headers. HTTP headers show what % of people use what browser... If "99.5%" of your customers use IE (or software which makes such a claim), you test it on IE and say that you support IE. If the software (Mozilla) is not fully compatible with IE, then it's Mozilla's fault for advertising to the web server that it is IE.
Which HTML standard (HTTP is the transfer protocol, and that is the responsibility of the server)? 3? 4? XHTML? CSS? JavaScript? etc.Which web browser? Not everyone uses IE or Mozilla. And people use IE who can't see or hear. How do you make your web pages accessible to your disabled customers? Does Mozilla support text-to-speech or graile readers? Some governments require these things.
Compatability is a double edged sword. In order to be 100% compatible with a thing, you must be a thing. Dogs and Cats are not 100% compatible.
To you, HTML is something special. To Microsoft, HTML is just another way to write a Windows app. Want proof? Have you ever seen the IE error messages inside of the Windows Explorer? Last time I checked, people write apps for Windows a whole lot more often than they write apps for Linux. There's nothing wrong with that. People generally follow the path of least resistance. Microsoft knows and understands this, so you need to find a way to make your competing software offer something other than following the standard... In other words, you have to lead. Not on a moral ground, but on a functional one."When the people lead, the leaders they will have to follow."
-Ben Harper
Step 1: Decide if you're trying to make a profit or a political statement.
Step 2: If you're trying to make a profit, choose the best software you can afford. Don't use open source and/or GPL as a deciding factor, because it doesn't mean anything about the quality of the software. The time you save not dealing with an incomplete free program will pay for the cost of purchased software numerous times.
If you're trying to make a political statement... Good luck keeping your job!
1) Do what you can with Open Source
2) Use closed source for everything not covered by 1)
3) Over time, develop in-house open-source projects to replace the items covered by 2)
4) Release Open Source projects and gain 1000000 Whuffie points of credit.
4) Profit!
See my blog at Who's Who
there are very few sales order management systems available as open source.
custom is one that i started doing, it's based on some e-commerce software i wrote, which is in turn based on a distributed python os system.
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Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
While you may be able to find ERP and other software that will do some of what you want. I do believe there is one aspect I didn't see covered in this thread: phone billing standards are expensive, and OSS billing applications for such are few.
What can you tell us about the output of your VOIP gateway when it comes to measuring calls? Long Distance? Finding a match for such might be harder than writing something yourself in some cases.
Thanks, man. I really apreciate your help.
Shoot, a trip to *Slashdot* showed me that.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
There is also a fix for it, but unfortunatly this "fix" hasn't fixed it for me yet, and from what I've read on the support forums, this fix has worked for some but not everyone.
Sun Java Desktop
Sun Java Desktop
Get used to it. People do not have the time to go and do all of this, just like you, which is why a company that does invest in a product that is good enough for other people to use means they should be able to get the investment back by selling it to others.
If you put together an entire system, would you want to give it all away for free so that your competitors get to have a free ride? I think not.
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html?ta
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=653
I personally develop web based applications, and whenever possible I target a DOM base.. however, the need for active-x controls in some situations, make it hard to develop for all.
I am currently working on a training software that requires a cad plugin to display certain things properly.. VRML won't cut it as the designs are too large. My hands are kinda tied in this... the real need is for cross platform plugins that are as readily available as the number of Active-X controls for these situations, and they simply don't exist.
I don't like MS's politics any more than anyone else here. However, they did make it pretty easy to offer a rich interface via web.. which is probably why ASP/ASP.Net + IE have made such inroads for intranet/extranet development. It is simply a good combination for this. The down side, is situations as in this post, where someone *WANTS* and OSS solution, and I commend that.. I think for things like accounting, there shouldn't be proprietary combinations for IE... But, as I said, there are times that IE is the good choice.
When you are running an extranet application for 10,000+ machines, that is custom written, an IE locking isn't so bad compared to trying to distribute/replicate application updates remotely.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
We are actually quite busy in all areas above:
Database independence - we started implementing an OMG based workflow engine. This will allow us to do the transaction control in Java and convert the PL/SQL to Java.
We'll discontinue the JBoss specific functionality (MBeans) and convert it to standard J2EE technology.
We'll convert to Java Faces, which produces a bit better HTML UI and is browser independent.
All that requires real work and a commitment for more than an hour per day and actually quite a few years experience with complex systems. It's not easy to contribute to a full featured business application, but the ones who do are able to deliver supreme benefits to their (paying) customers.
Deploy a Citrix server. Publish your Win32 and/or IE specific apps to _that_, and access it from your linux desktop.
....
It works find from my PowerBook at least
Display some adaptability.
We, too, run a business using open source and closed source, too. Our business is for handicapped and impaired users, including the elderly. One item we find with open source is that it is way too nerdy for our users. Since we are a "charity" type organization, we MUST be fully in Compliance with the W3C Accessiblity Standards for our users. This, also, includes all forms, user tools, and many adminstrative tools. We Must be fully crossplatform As well. In many casses, we find that the tools for opensource are simply not ready for our clients. Also, many tools are not available via Opensource; such things as JAWS or Braille readers are "Windows" only or are way beyond the fanancial means of the user. It is a shame that the 1/3 of the population (the approx. of impaired users) of this great nation is totally ingnored. The government and Big Business needs to start making themselves "accessible" to the handicapped, so why doesn't the Open Source Community, too?
Retired dinosaur, simple user, volunteer, guinea pig
Great elitist attitude! Yes, we're ashamed of our dates! As we were ashamed we didn't have pretty red uniforms in that war....