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Design a Virtual Office with Open Source?
apropos asks: "An interesting question came up recently when discussing (yet again) starting an open-source based consulting company: 'How would you design the ultimate virtual office with open source software?' With things like fax, VoIP, web, email, security and office suites all available as open source products, what kind of useful things could be done? One idea that came to mind was emailing answering machine recordings. What would you put into your ultimate virtual office solution?"
That's what I'd put into the picture. People. Remember, technology is nothing but an enabler. From the receptionist who answers your phone (can be in a call center, sure, but they should be breathing) to the monkey on the keyboard getting the job done, people are what will make the difference. Everything else is an end to a means, and besides - there's nothing like dealing with people to cut through some of the crap that we get day in and day out with this stuff.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
I think I'd recommend a good secretary. A good secretary who'll take messages for you and deliver them is a lot more practical and easier to implement than a system to email answering machine messenges. Then, you can actually conduct business instead of designing whizz-bang systems that are little more than novelties. Just a thought.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Aside from the standard web-based groupware, time and project tracking, file sharing, faxing, customer collaboration/communication, and coding tools.. I would add wireless, low-bandwidth optimized UI's to all of the above as well as to things like Nessus, nmap, ssh, load testing, data validation services, site scraper, etc. etc.
Its nice to be able to sit with a client at lunch and run a security scan and site survey from your PDA and fax the results back to him so they are waiting in his office when he gets back.
I am building those tools for my fledgling company and used some of them today at a client site.
I haven't done it yet (largely because of the cost involved and my current lack of funds), but an open source VOIP system could kick ass and save you money. Phone systems are historically very expensive. It should be possible to run VOIP on your NAT router with an asterisk compatable phone card that supports say, 4 extensions (assuming a small office here). Phones are probably your biggest expense, but a complete phone system is often an order of magnitude higher than what can currently be implemented with VOIP in a small office, at least that's my take on it.
Slackware, what else when it must be secure, stable, and easy?
The one area in which MS Ofiice is way ahead of any open source software is the functionality of Excel. Making graphs, sorting and binning, analyzing data - these are basic but exceedingly useful functions Excel does much better than any open source spreadsheet software I've ever used. Those who rely heavily on data analysis will use higher-powered programs than Excel, but for intermediate users, having that functionality quickly at hand is very useful. This is one area where, though it's not a fancy "new innovation," that could really improve the usefulness of open source spreadsheet programs.
How do you pay people you not only can't see daily, but possibly may have never even met in person? How can you check up on the current state of your operation?
Open Standards Portal
Why is parent modded up? The original post was talking about a virtual open source based office.
Silly me, I actually spend about a minute looking for the source code on the author's site! The least that the parent could have done is to mention explicitely that it's not open source, so as to avoid deceiving people.
Obvious features are intercepting all outgoing fax and data calls to see if they can be routed over the internet to save on toll charges. Less obvious is setting up a special email account which automatically prints attachments of any email received -- just don't give out this address to spammers!
Personally, I think all received faxes should be saved to hard disk and previewed before being printed to prevent wasting paper. But I'm not sure how easy this is to implement currently with open source.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
You'll find the switch in your breaker box. Or on your power strip/UPS if you arrange things carefully.
No one forces you to take your cell phone with you at all times, or to actually have it turned on if you do have it with you. If you've been trained to salivate every time a bell rings, well, untrain yourself, we have that advantage over dogs.
Yes, I know your post was a joke, but it's one of those jokes that's funny because of its ultimate truth.
The power of control was with you all along. Just click your heels together three times.
KFG
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice. They want something that works, and where every application looks the same and works the same. They also do not care about recompiling their kernel every time they buy some hardware, or recompiling software to alter some setting only available compile-time.
So pick KDE or GNOME, and only use apps that are particular to one or agnostic to either. Don't tell the users that the other exists, and like you said, they won't care. I think the point here is make this virtual office work from the beginning, and don't let joe office worker install a new card or dick around with a possibly unsupported webcam after his computer has been configured.
I dare not count how many Open Source projects actually start out creating a logo, a hompeage, and an implementation of themes, a particularly pointless feature. Somehow that says everything. For most of them, anyways.
Right, 90% of everything is crap. Nothing insightful there. If you know how to use google intelligently, read trade publications or slashdot, and so forth, then you know what's good and what works. Browsing sourceforge or freshmeat randomly is not how you find software to create a work environment quickly and easily.
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice.
If they do not care about choice (and I don't think that's true of all of them, or even most, or things like skins wouldn't exist in the first place), that's not a problem: in a business environment, the choice of UI is made by the IT department, not the end users. They will choose either Gnome or KDE, as they see fit. The end user, if unfamiliar with FOSS, may be unaware that there even *was* a choice. Nor will the end users ever have to recompile a kernel, or even install one. Do you know long it's been since I've had to build a custom kernel? Never. That is, I've never *had* to build one. Sometimes I do, but it's not necessary, I just do it for fun. Mostly, I use whatever is current in Debian Sid.
Can you tell me anything in, say, Star Office/OpenOffice.org that takes "a Ph.D in Rocket Science (or two hours of trial-and-failure)" to do? I rarely use MS Office (my usual work environment is a text editor) or OpenOffice.org, but when I use either, I find the behavior of both similar, and the ease (or lack thereof) to do things similar as well. Put another way, if your claim is true of FOSS office suites, it is just as true of the most popular proprietary ones.
What about browsers? Hmmm. Mozilla, Firefox, and Konqueror are just as easy to use as IE, and easiser to configure, especially from a security standpoint.
Email? Outlook and Outlook Express have nothing on Evolution and Kmail (or Sylpheed or Balsa) for usability.
Text editors? Same story.
I fully agree that usability is important, but if you can point to an actual usability problem in some FOSS software likely to be used in an office environment, please do. You have not made your case at all.
Well, the question stands who is the user that you are targeting with your "usability". If you read the original post again it mentions the discussion centered around virtual office needs for a technology company (consulting, software, etc.). My company is a technology and myself and my colleagues have a definition of usability that centers on our ability to hack at it if it doesnt do what we want. Our motto of sorts, however, is something along the lines of "we know technology so you dont have to" and our customers often have their own definitions of usability.
Unlike proprietary software, they dont have to memorize how the vendor wants them to use the application, they tell me and I make it work for them how they want it. That usability model is also different.
Not to say that many open source packages don't suck as end-user tools, but everyone has different ideas of usability and its strength is that I can make it fit those ideas.
I only use Mozilla but I have to support IE too. It is much easier to configure proxies in IE because I can type the address once and check a box that says use this address for all proxies. But in Mozilla/NS I have to type it in repeatedly. Not a big deal until you do it a hundred times over the course of a year.
I also have a beef with Mozilla over anonymous FTP access. When IE hits an ftp site like ftp://ftp.somedamncompanyname.com and anonymous with a default password fails, it pops up a dialog box to get the needed info from the user. But Mozilla does not. This issue has been submitted as a bug/enhancement literally at least a dozen times but the developers have classified it as an IE work-alike feature and given it very low priority so it sits unfixed years after it was submitted (bug 124561). They don't understand that end user usability should be given high priority not low. And it is a very easy fix too! Talk about frustrating!
But I do love Mozilla. I just wish it's development was a little more customer driven.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The purpose of the assistant is to interface with the outside world so that you can do the creative engineering that customers want to pay for.
The phone's gonna ring. Are you going to answer it every time, interrupt your train of thought, and devote your attention to juggling it? Or are you going to dump all your incoming calls into voicemail and deal with them one day per week?
If you don't have a lot of cash, try paying your assistant the same thing that you're paying yourself: a chunk of equity along with a low salary.
I'm not a business process engineer but you have to consider these issues if you plan to be in business.
Rather than buy it with virtual money, why not outsource it to slashdot, the ultimate free consultancy service:
1) Set up consultancy firm
2) Ask slashdot
3) Profit
I think you are mistaking OSS Developers for some sort of enterprise company (some are, but not all of us).
Most of us start a project that is useful for us only, later we found that it can be useful for other people, then we make our software Open Source, for everybody to use, share and modify.
We are not about users, we are about sharing. You can modify it if you don't like it, it works for me. OSS people are very kind and care about their users, but their users don't help, they always keep yelling out loud of how the software isn't what they want, that why the interface is ugly, blah, blah, blah.
Stop this crap at once, you don't pay me for coding, i already giving it for free, if you don't like it you can look for other projects or buy some software that does what you want!. Don't bother me with nonsenses, the code is there, help!
C-x C-c
OpenGroupware already does all that. Download a PDF presentation to read up some more on it. It will even integerate with dirty Outlook if you purchase a commerical plugin at the same time it will provide you with a decent web interface for free.