I posted that I’d be trying out the new Lotus Symphony suite of office productivity tools. Well that didn’t take. I probably should have changed over the file properties for xls, doc, and ppt files to open with Symphony. Since I didn’t, I hardly used the tools at all.
Here’s the rub with Symphony and the other MS Office alternatives. Microsoft Office reached dominance not because of the functions that your average user cares about and that every basic office suite does well. The tools were widely adopted because introductory level developers (like me) were able to quickly build department level applications that helped improve staff productivity. In the absence of any real developer tools, I don’t believe Lotus Symphony or any other MS Office alternative has a shot at being anything more than a niche product.
I hate that I didn’t do a decent evaluation of the Lotus tools. But the reality is that I spend my time working with tools that fit the environments my clients have in place. As long as organizations have one person who has gone past the basic data entry functions of Excel, I will never convince them that an Office alternative will work for them. And if they’re so small that they don’t have a serious investment in MS Office, why would I ever recommend they start out using tools that can’t be extended as their needs grow?
I’m an avid reader of Seth Godin’s blog. His latest post states that companies waste too much time on original web design. Your web site isn’t supposed to be a work of art. It’s supposed to be a window into your business for your customers. If you sell, then make it easy to buy. If you provide services, make it easy to understand what you do and how those services can be procured. Start with a site that you like, and have your designer build from there.
The only thing I’d add to his post is that you don’t have to limit your up front research to looking at existing sites. There are thousands of free or very inexpensive site templates that can be modified to fit your tastes. Look on oswd.org or Google "website templates" for tons of resources. Don’t spend time or money reinventing the wheel.
One of the greatest developments in office software suites has been the desktop database. People have done some pretty complex things with relative ease using tools like Microsoft Access. Now, online databases such as DabbleDB and ZohoDB are advancing the tool and allowing companies to collaborate outside their own borders using secure databases.
I have a love/hate relationship with MS Access. Way back when, I spent a lot of time doing Microsoft Office development and Access was a favorite tool of mine. I liked that I could easily hook up to the enterprise databases, pull the information I needed and integrate it with any other application I happened to build.
But people who do Access development full time tend to get trapped into that box. When the task becomes greater than the tool, they simply find ways to make it work. And that leads to problems.
Nowadays I spend a lot of time supporting an Access database that has outgrown its skin. I’m rebuilding the application with a SQL Server back end, and ASP.NET and Sharepoint on the front end. But it’s a really slow process because there are so many business rules hard coded into the VBA. Identifying the code that has to be there versus what was done inefficiently is a real chore. And all the while I spend time helping users through crashes, data corruption, and reports that aren’t tying out.
So, here’s my advice of the day. Use Access. Or Dabble or Zoho. They’re great tools and fill a need. But when you need more than a couple users, have rigorous security requirements, need sophisticated data entry forms, or have complex reporting needs, it’s time for a different tool. Don’t put this off. Your application will only become more complex over time. And you’ll end up spending a lot of time and money supporting the application instead of improving your business.
Back at the beginning of 2007, I signed a reseller agreement with Qqest Software Systems, maker of the Timeforce time and attendance system. I had implemented Timeforce for a client after a comparison of the system with comparable systems from Kronos and ADP. I found that the Timeforce system has a great breadth of features and is much less expensive than its larger competitors.
And after I learned that one of my other clients used Timeforce as well, I figured that signing the agreement would do two things:
- Improve the level of service I was providing my clients, and
- Open up another line of revenue for my growing consulting business.
However, in considering the agreement I forgot that the main mission of a reseller is to expand the vendor’s sales reach. There’s no way for a reseller to provide a greater level of support than the vendor. You can be more responsive to the client, and you can use the tools that the vendor provides to move support closer to the client. But you can’t support their product better than they can. And if the vendor chooses to focus on sales over client support, then there’s not much a reseller can do.
I recommend that any business in need of a time management system evaluate Timeforce. There are certain company types for whom Timeforce is definitely not a great solution. So I’d be happy to assist you in your evaluation.
But as often happens with lower cost products, Qqest has to focus on new sales in order to grow. Any reseller whose core business is reselling Timeforce will be in a similar situation, since they only receive a percentage of the sale. Understand this going in, and you will likely be very pleased with your experience.
Microsoft Office is undeniably the leader of office productivity suites. It’s a standard throughout all businesses and the need to have it installed on your PCs is almost a given. But free or open source alternatives are available. I’d used Open Office before and never really got excited by it. That might have been my own fault though…I was trying it on a Mac and I’m not a proficient Mac user. Competent, but not proficient.
Anyway, I don’t think open source alternatives to MS Office will ever be viable until someone puts millions of dollars into refining the software over 3 or 4 major versions. So when I heard that IBM had released a version of Open Office, I figured I should try it out. They’ve got the ability to dedicate this type of commitment if they really want to.
Lotus Symphony consists of the basic modules everyone needs - Spreadsheets (i.e., MS Excel), Documents (i.e., MS Word) and Presentations (i.e., MS PowerPoint).
I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly the software downloaded and installed. I don’t have an exact timing, but I seem to recall my last MS Office installation taking over an hour to install. Of course, that was MS Office 2007 Enterprise which also installed Access, InfoPath, Outlook and Publisher. In retrospect, I guess I should have expected the trimmed down offering from IBM to install much more quickly.
The interface looks ok. It’s certainly not familiar like MS Office. In the end, this may be the one thing that dooms all open office suites. But I got used to the new MS Office ribbon, and I’m sure I can get used to Symphony’s toolbars.
I’m really going to try to use Symphony over the coming weeks. I’m going to try to keep an open mind and work with the product as exclusively as I can. I readily admit that I’ll be fighting my own biases. For example, I’ve already got a couple gripes:
- I can’t open the MS Word template that I use for my business correspondence,
- Spreadsheets doesn’t highlight a copy area,
- There’s an extra menu layer with only one option when you select File > Open,
- You can’t connect Spreadsheets to an ODBC data source to pull data into a file from a database.
I’ll let you know what else I find. I’m pulling for Symphony. I really am. I’d love to be able to recommend a free office suite that handles all the basic functions an SMB needs. We’ll see if Symphony is up to the task.
