Even the smallest amount of research about the cost and time to implement an ERP would indicate that it will cost a lot more than you think and customizing it to fit your specific business will take both time and a lot of money.
ERP systems are huge, extremely complex and when implemented incredibly essential to the running of the company. If an ERP system goes down, the business stops. That is why you spend the time, money and consulting fees to have it configured as a very high availability system. Esp when we are talking about a company of the presumed size you indicate.
The fact that you have apps running in Excel and Access is horrible, common, but very bad for a lot of reasons. This problem might have been discovered while implementing the ERP.
Since you are already investing heavily into the ERP, making it part of that system makes the most sense to me. The benefits of integrating these data and functionality reaps benefits across the ERP system.
Now going to Slashdot, where a whole lot of people you have non idea who is, nor what their real life experience with ERP systems are borders upon irresponsible. Would you take the information offered by a pimply teenager on how to solve your problems? Or maybe its an ERP expert, how do you know.
Since you work at a company that has a lot of resources, the prudent thing to do, is to find a consulting company with a proven track record in the ERP you are working with (different from the people you already have) and pay them to come in and do a discovery of existing excel and Access applications, map out their functionality and do an estimate for each one, how much it will cost (ballpark) to implement them in the ERP system and give recommendations for each application as to its suitability for migration. There is likely no one answer for all of them.
Microsoft is pretty good at giving away cheap or free licences to charities.
Whether you personally are a "Being a die-hard OSS geek" is as irrelevant as if you are gay.
Unless you plan to stick around and volunteer for the next decade or more, or you have a steady supply of "Being a die-hard OSS geek" volunteers lined up replace each other, dont be an ass and land the charity in deeper problems.
Are you donating cloud servers for them to use to host the MySql plus python for the next decade with built in support?
Or do you intend to install it on one of their machines, maybe with Linux on it, and install the app via docker?
You want a solution that is as easy for non computer people to use but also to MAINTAIN, to MOVE, to UPDATE.
Access has a lot of issues, but even a volunteer with little experience can move an access file. if required, and fill out forms.
If the charity is lucky they will land another geek who can add some fields to a form and make a new report something like that.
In fact, a lot of the user would probably prefer to track the whole thing in a spreadsheet, because its something they understand.
Having your super duper optimized Mongo db Python node.js application be super fast, and really OSS, aint gonna be a good thing when Bob takes over from you and they need two new reports.
For this kind of charity work KISS: Keep it simple Stupid. and KIRSS Keep it real simple stupid.
You need to spend more time writing a user manual and documentation that will live on after you are gone that will be needed and loved by all than you do inventing a tech stack and writing software to do a job Access does ok.
Want support for Access? Easy to get. Want someone to support your Mongo, Python, node.js application. Hard to get.
Access, probably wont cost them anything Access, lots of easy ways to get support Access, its in MS Office, kinda looks a bit like Office, People like Office. Access, super easy to export data into Excel Access, built in report generator that might be used by a power user. Access, made for this use case.
Personally I dont want to touch Access with a ten foot pole, and consider it evil, but if I am trying to help a charity get going, raise money and general do good by them, for this work Access is the best option, even if I have to humiliate myself to set it up. Its not about you living your OSS dream, its about helping those in need.
Why not a med camp. Where you can really get to know what you need in a few weeks. Plus you the costs compared to medical school would be a lot cheaper.
Ok so maybe they cant teach you all about anatomy and neurons and everything, but few doctors need that.
If we can teach them for instance heart surgery, or general medical things like a GP would see that would be more than good enough.
I actually think that replacing them with WindowsRT surface units would be better, if they must go that way. There are some from other manufacturers that are laptops running WindowsRT.
Putting Linux on the existing hardware would also make more sense, at least its well established and can run full versions of available software in addition to running Chrome apps. that would save them even more money.
But throwing out machines that could run a free operating system and replacing them with brand new Chromebooks, that are very limited in processor capacity and memory. Figuring that every document will be stored in the cloud somewhere so that is not a concern.
What are the enterprise tools available for Chromebooks? Can you remotely push configurations to the machines, make a change and push out new ones?
Are they going with Office 365 then? To use from their Chromebooks?
So Appple, due it being an American company and the Snowden revelations are not considered secure by the Russians anymore. Makes sense.
Then they chose a product from Samsung a South Korean company. South Korean Intelligence is so tightly coupled with American intelligence as to make no difference. Furthermore at the bottom lays an operating system written by an American company just like Apple. There is no "secure" Android version from Samsung to be had.
The beast is pretty much a tank. Heavily armored with a lot of communications gear. I dont think its viable at this point to make it electric and still give it the range it requires.
I am not sure what kind of engine it has, but it has to be something powerful.
That is one of the least informative articles I have read in a long time. In fact I feel dumber for having read it.
It picks numbers out of thin air for the "standard programing" model, then it has some magic pixie dust that represents the result in reactive programming as a few lines of code.
Since the government can harvest what they need via agreements/PRISM/backdoors/secret courts, what you give Facebook you give the US Intelligence services which in turn are part of the government.
So we are contributing to each. Well I have never had a FB account and never plan to have one but that is just me. I enjoy my friends in person, more than poking them on a website.
Did you want to start your OSS career contributing to the Linux kernel? You will have to work a lot, and for a long time to ever get to be the target of Linus's rants.
Or are you saying that all OSS projects are abusive and bad? Because that just is not the case at all.
Secondly and more importantly, if you were an aspiring chef, and you wanted to apprentice to hone your skills do you want to do that with a guy who can teach you to sling burgers at mcDonalds, you will learn quick, and it can be polite. Or do you you want to learn from a master chef, who has his Michelin stars and 30 years experience? The latter will be harder, requiring sacrifices and be willing to take some shit. But at the end you will be a much better chef.
This is a typical "I love you, you are perfect, now change".
How long has she been involved in the kernel development progress? She should have known all that time how Linus gets things done. He has gotten a bit milder over the years, but mostly he has stayed the same, he has stayed Linus.
Why does she presume that the entire process for the mailing list need to change because *she* has now decided she does not like it. That is extremely arrogant. Nobody is forcing her to be part of the mailing list or to work on the kernel. If she feels strongly about it, and you cannot work with people who have a different way of communicate than what you prefer, then leave.
I feel icy fear stabbing at me by the use of "professional", what in the world does that really mean. and lets get together and write a document about how people must behave on the kernel mailing list.
To me, this grandstanding that she is doing, is in order to buy herself more publicity and fame, and gain points for "standing up" as a woman.
The collaboration on the Linux kernel is between extremely talented developers. Anyone who has spent serious time working with developers, being a developer, knows that they can be very different from each and very passionate.
So, they have lost of Blackberries today, they work, they are secure and they are proven secure. (With BB10 they might have to do all the testing over again)
Apparently somehow Samsung and Android have managed to be approved or at least in the running. And now iPhones running iOS6 have also been approved.
So now, they will spend millions and more of tax payer money, to create a special store with iOS applications, presumably a special store with Android applications, while still maintaining all of their Blackberry infrastructure.
This adds many levels of complexity for the infrastructure,and the hiring and training of support personal for all sorts of devices. Why? What benefit does Pentagon bet from maintaing 3 different platforms instead of one?
The only reason I see for this clusterf. is that vendors have greaser enough hands, to get into this lucrative market, again leaving our forces to deal with the implications.
So Pakistan is a country that supports terrorism you claim. Then if for instance Iran was a major contributor to the ruling regime in Pakistan it would be easy to conclude that Iran is supporting terrorism by supporting Pakistan.
So, since the United States is one of the biggest donor of aid to Pakistan http://transition.usaid.gov/pk/about/budget.html And that we have lifted the arms embargo and are presently upgrading their F16 fighters and selling them more F16 fighters, does that count as the US supporting terrorism, by supporting Pakistan?
Is it only me or does this story sound rather um.... Big PR little content.
I mean Linux has been free for _all_ since it came out. Every school all over the world can, (if they have the ability) download it and use it. If they dont, they can buy a cd from CheapBytes and use that one. (Instead of getting ripped off by RedHat paying $80 for _free_ software) So like DUH. It sounds more like a scam than a great deal. it should have read: "Red Hat today offered free software FREE to schools".
Oracle on Linux suffers from what all software does on a first release and is less stable than for instances on Solaris and possibly less stable than under NT.
I would not put mission critical stufff on Linux/Oracle before I see a strong indication that Oracle will continue to support it and a few more releases down the line.
Larry is not known making choices he stands by really. (Anyone remember 4MB Javastations that would do EVERYTHING) ehe.
But in a few years time Linux/Oracle might be ready for the mission critical things.
Till then Solaris or NT is probably the safest bet.
yeah until you try to display a page I guess Mozilla might actually not crash. If you want to read it fire up IE5.
heh I know you probably like to read standards and maybe you like found one point IE5 doesnt do right, but guess what 99% dont care. Just like it was with Netscape when they first messed up the standards. but oh I guess you have forgotten and forgiven since oh you think they are kewl, since oh you get to use even more alpha software, even more broken browser than ever before, but since you might look at its crappy code it doesnt matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the smallest amount of research about the cost and time to implement an ERP would indicate that it will cost a lot more than you think and customizing it to fit your specific business will take both time and a lot of money.
ERP systems are huge, extremely complex and when implemented incredibly essential to the running of the company.
If an ERP system goes down, the business stops. That is why you spend the time, money and consulting fees to have it
configured as a very high availability system. Esp when we are talking about a company of the presumed size you indicate.
The fact that you have apps running in Excel and Access is horrible, common, but very bad for a lot of reasons.
This problem might have been discovered while implementing the ERP.
Since you are already investing heavily into the ERP, making it part of that system makes the most sense to me.
The benefits of integrating these data and functionality reaps benefits across the ERP system.
Now going to Slashdot, where a whole lot of people you have non idea who is, nor what their real life experience with ERP systems
are borders upon irresponsible. Would you take the information offered by a pimply teenager on how to solve your problems? Or maybe
its an ERP expert, how do you know.
Since you work at a company that has a lot of resources, the prudent thing to do, is to find a consulting company with a proven track record
in the ERP you are working with (different from the people you already have) and pay them to come in and do a discovery of existing excel
and Access applications, map out their functionality and do an estimate for each one, how much it will cost (ballpark) to implement them in the ERP system
and give recommendations for each application as to its suitability for migration. There is likely no one answer for all of them.
Microsoft is pretty good at giving away cheap or free licences to charities.
Whether you personally are a "Being a die-hard OSS geek" is as irrelevant
as if you are gay.
Unless you plan to stick around and volunteer for the next decade or
more, or you have a steady supply of "Being a die-hard OSS geek"
volunteers lined up replace each other, dont be an ass and land the
charity in deeper problems.
Are you donating cloud servers for them to use to host the
MySql plus python for the next decade with built in support?
Or do you intend to install it on one of their machines, maybe
with Linux on it, and install the app via docker?
You want a solution that is as easy for non computer people
to use but also to MAINTAIN, to MOVE, to UPDATE.
Access has a lot of issues, but even a volunteer with
little experience can move an access file. if required,
and fill out forms.
If the charity is lucky they will land another geek who
can add some fields to a form and make a new report
something like that.
In fact, a lot of the user would probably prefer to track
the whole thing in a spreadsheet, because its something
they understand.
Having your super duper optimized Mongo db Python
node.js application be super fast, and really OSS, aint
gonna be a good thing when Bob takes over from you
and they need two new reports.
For this kind of charity work KISS: Keep it simple Stupid.
and KIRSS Keep it real simple stupid.
You need to spend more time writing a user manual and
documentation that will live on after you are gone that will
be needed and loved by all than you do inventing a tech
stack and writing software to do a job Access does ok.
Want support for Access? Easy to get.
Want someone to support your Mongo, Python, node.js
application. Hard to get.
Access, probably wont cost them anything
Access, lots of easy ways to get support
Access, its in MS Office, kinda looks a bit like Office, People like Office.
Access, super easy to export data into Excel
Access, built in report generator that might be used by a power user.
Access, made for this use case.
Personally I dont want to touch Access with a ten foot pole,
and consider it evil, but if I am trying to help a charity get
going, raise money and general do good by them, for this
work Access is the best option, even if I have to humiliate
myself to set it up. Its not about you living your OSS dream,
its about helping those in need.
Why not a med camp.
Where you can really get to know what you need in a few weeks.
Plus you the costs compared to medical school would be a lot cheaper.
Ok so maybe they cant teach you all about anatomy and neurons and everything, but
few doctors need that.
If we can teach them for instance heart surgery, or general medical things like a GP would see
that would be more than good enough.
So windows 2012 server doesnt do anything for you huh?
Have you ever spent time writing VBA code?
Did you enjoy it?
If we want more people to take up coding, making them do VBA code is a great way to scare everyone away from ever programming again.
I actually think that replacing them with WindowsRT surface units would be better,
if they must go that way. There are some from other manufacturers that are laptops
running WindowsRT.
Putting Linux on the existing hardware would also make more sense, at least
its well established and can run full versions of available software in addition to
running Chrome apps. that would save them even more money.
But throwing out machines that could run a free operating system and replacing
them with brand new Chromebooks, that are very limited in processor capacity
and memory. Figuring that every document will be stored in the cloud somewhere
so that is not a concern.
What are the enterprise tools available for Chromebooks? Can you remotely
push configurations to the machines, make a change and push out new ones?
Are they going with Office 365 then? To use from their Chromebooks?
So Appple, due it being an American company and the Snowden revelations are not considered
secure by the Russians anymore.
Makes sense.
Then they chose a product from Samsung a South Korean company.
South Korean Intelligence is so tightly coupled with American intelligence as to make no difference.
Furthermore at the bottom lays an operating system written by an American company just like Apple.
There is no "secure" Android version from Samsung to be had.
Remember GnuTLS
The beast is pretty much a tank. Heavily armored with a lot of communications gear.
I dont think its viable at this point to make it electric and still give it the range it requires.
I am not sure what kind of engine it has, but it has to be something powerful.
That is one of the least informative articles I have read in a long time.
In fact I feel dumber for having read it.
It picks numbers out of thin air for the "standard programing" model,
then it has some magic pixie dust that represents the result in
reactive programming as a few lines of code.
The sum of money does seem low, but when an agency like the NSA
comes calling, I have a feeling that it they make you a proposal you
cannot refuse.
(Or you can do what Lavabit did, and just shut it down)
Since the government can harvest what they need via agreements/PRISM/backdoors/secret courts,
what you give Facebook you give the US Intelligence services which in turn are part of the government.
So we are contributing to each. Well I have never had a FB account and never plan to have one
but that is just me. I enjoy my friends in person, more than poking them on a website.
Did you want to start your OSS career contributing to the Linux kernel?
You will have to work a lot, and for a long time to ever get to be the target of Linus's rants.
Or are you saying that all OSS projects are abusive and bad?
Because that just is not the case at all.
Secondly and more importantly, if you were an aspiring chef, and you wanted to apprentice to hone your skills
do you want to do that with a guy who can teach you to sling burgers at mcDonalds, you will learn quick,
and it can be polite. Or do you you want to learn from a master chef, who has his Michelin stars and 30 years
experience? The latter will be harder, requiring sacrifices and be willing to take some shit. But at the end
you will be a much better chef.
This is a typical "I love you, you are perfect, now change".
How long has she been involved in the kernel development progress?
She should have known all that time how Linus gets things done.
He has gotten a bit milder over the years, but mostly he has stayed
the same, he has stayed Linus.
Why does she presume that the entire process for the mailing list need to change because *she* has now
decided she does not like it. That is extremely arrogant. Nobody is forcing her to be part of the mailing
list or to work on the kernel. If she feels strongly about it, and you cannot work with people who have a
different way of communicate than what you prefer, then leave.
I feel icy fear stabbing at me by the use of "professional", what in the world does that really mean.
and lets get together and write a document about how people must behave on the kernel mailing list.
To me, this grandstanding that she is doing, is in order to buy herself more publicity and fame, and
gain points for "standing up" as a woman.
The collaboration on the Linux kernel is between extremely talented developers. Anyone who has spent
serious time working with developers, being a developer, knows that they can be very different from each
and very passionate.
The article is about an industry still using the PDP-11,
I am pretty sure we can still find people who use
Vax as well, and plan on continuing.
So.. Did someone just catch up on the later seasons?
So, they have lost of Blackberries today, they work, they are secure and they are proven secure.
(With BB10 they might have to do all the testing over again)
Apparently somehow Samsung and Android have managed to be approved or at least in the running.
And now iPhones running iOS6 have also been approved.
So now, they will spend millions and more of tax payer money, to create a special store with iOS applications,
presumably a special store with Android applications, while still maintaining all of their Blackberry infrastructure.
This adds many levels of complexity for the infrastructure,and the hiring and training of support personal
for all sorts of devices. Why? What benefit does Pentagon bet from maintaing 3 different platforms
instead of one?
The only reason I see for this clusterf. is that vendors have greaser enough hands, to get into this lucrative
market, again leaving our forces to deal with the implications.
This table should have been in my comment.
Your tax dollars at work here donating 11.740
BILLION USD to the Pakistan military since 2002.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_aid_to_Pakistan#Military_and_economic_aid
So Pakistan is a country that supports terrorism you claim.
Then if for instance Iran was a major contributor to the ruling regime in Pakistan
it would be easy to conclude that Iran is supporting terrorism by supporting Pakistan.
So, since the United States is one of the biggest donor of aid to Pakistan
http://transition.usaid.gov/pk/about/budget.html
And that we have lifted the arms embargo and are presently upgrading their
F16 fighters and selling them more F16 fighters, does that count as
the US supporting terrorism, by supporting Pakistan?
Is it only me or does this story sound
rather um.... Big PR little content.
I mean Linux has been free for _all_ since
it came out. Every school all over the world
can, (if they have the ability) download it
and use it.
If they dont, they can buy a cd from CheapBytes
and use that one. (Instead of getting ripped off
by RedHat paying $80 for _free_ software)
So like DUH.
It sounds more like a scam than a great deal.
it should have read:
"Red Hat today offered free software FREE to schools".
Um so your statement is that MP3 sounds
just as good a syour cd player?
Then my advice to you, old boy
is to buy a new amp, speakers and cd player.
Geez.
It doesnt sound as good.
But the the way lots of ppl listen to them
its obvious they dont care.
I mean most SoundCards sound like crap.
(some exceptions do exists)
But hi end audio it aint.
Oracle on Linux suffers from what all software
does on a first release and is
less stable than for instances on Solaris
and possibly less stable than under NT.
I would not put mission critical stufff on
Linux/Oracle before I see a strong indication
that Oracle will continue to support it and
a few more releases down the line.
Larry is not known making choices he stands by
really. (Anyone remember 4MB Javastations
that would do EVERYTHING) ehe.
But in a few years time Linux/Oracle might be
ready for the mission critical things.
Till then Solaris or NT is probably the safest bet.
yeah until you try to display a page
I guess Mozilla might actually not crash.
If you want to read it fire up IE5.
heh I know you probably like to read standards
and maybe you like found one point IE5
doesnt do right, but guess what 99%
dont care.
Just like it was with Netscape when they first
messed up the standards. but oh I guess you have
forgotten and forgiven since oh you think they
are kewl, since oh you get to use
even more alpha software, even more broken
browser than ever before, but since you might
look at its crappy code it doesnt matter.