Following my disaster last weekend, I decided to upgrade to Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista. There was not a huge reason for me to do this upgrade. I had mostly been operating ok under Windows XP Pro. But since I was down anyway I figured I might as well get the upgrade done.
Archive for the 'Solutions' Category
There’s a great blog post on Found|Read about free or nearly free software offered as web based services. I love #3 - Don’t do that custom development!
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?
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.
