What Business Software Runs Your Office? 60
bardkerbie asks: "I work as a webmaster and sysadmin for a small computer services shop (4 employees including the owner). We're to a point in the growth of our business where we need a system for tracking work orders as they come in and out of the shop, specifically inventory used and time spent. We use Quickbooks Pro 2006 for our accounting and payroll software. I've played around with a number of issue-tracking and CRM suites, including Bugzilla, Eventum, SugarCRM and vTiger, but all seem like they lack one critical piece to handle the workload we have. What do you use for tracking the work you do? Is it something you wrote yourself? Is there an open-source project that works well, or is there a Quickbooks plug-in we can purchase?"
What platform? (Score:3, Informative)
As a small shop you have the freedom to do things right from the start and not be locked into some legacy system someone put together in the 70's or 80's.
My advice to you is to code your own software and have it as a web service that you run from a beater server in the office. That way as long as there are browsers you'll never be locked in to one vendor, and as your business grows and you have to travel more you can access what you need on the road.
You're scaring me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? You know Macs have had programs for that for about, um, twenty-some years?
Now you're scaring me. Let's say you're pretty good and you code the thing in just 30 business days. Let's also say your time is "only" worth $320/day. You're going to take that $10K investment in a critical system and stick it on a "beater"? If you go this route, please at least take backups like HOURLY and have a second server standing by when the beater craps out.
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There is one place that uses Access for their primary customer relationship management and incident tracking system on a 10m+ gbp/year contract. The databased was pulled together by a regular member of staff, not a developer. It was written for Access 97 in 2005.
Why? Because based on internal charging rules (designed to move margin around) getting an
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Oh, and my title is "Systems Administrator/Programmer"
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The main applications are LAMP based and I wrote them myself originally, although they have been extended quite a bit since then.
Any of the growing number of thin clients can access our database through the LAN.
At the moment not having to pay for software licences, and being able to add new clients at the low cost of just a mobo, RAM,
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About the only difference I can see is that I'll be running Gentoo, and a few low powered 'embedded' systems [200Mhz-ish machines] will be running the thin clients. Basically it will default to very basic XFCE session and will have a stripped-down firefox that will display the web-based software that is being served from the server on the local LAN.
Since I am in the same situation, is there anything specifically you would suggest I ensure I take int
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We installed Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) and the LTSP [ltsp.org] 4.2 iso. Our thin clients are a combination of Jammer-125s and Compaq DP 2000s (stripped of all drives and using an intel nic with built-in PXE).
The sad part is we bought the 5 Compaqs for less than
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One or Zero (Score:2, Informative)
Bah, I typo'd the name in the link. (Score:2)
Oh, and one of the advantage of it being a simple LAMP base is there's no reason you couldn't gen your own reports out of the data in the DB in whatever your favorite scripting language is (or you could learn their template format and add to the existing reports and submit back. Go you.).
Dunno if you meant that as a slam... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dunno if you meant that as a slam... (Score:4, Informative)
Someone always comes up with an idea which they'd like to follow through with but is somehow difficult with vTiger.
Yes, I know there's the "it's open source, modify it yourself!" argument. I took one look at the vTiger code and ran away screaming.
Don't get me wrong, I couldn't code something like that up myself - but even so, I think the standards the folk behind vTiger have for what they describe as a "stable" release are a little slack. Just to put it into context, I don't consider "stable" release to mean "most of the core features are there and stable but there's a whole lot of stuff (including the "upgrade from earlier version" function) which isn't particularly stable at all, is not specifically marked as being unstable so you may not know until it's too late and hasn't been disabled for the release.
Further, I was particularly interested to note that the failure mode in much of vTiger (particularly if there's something even relatively minor amiss with the database) seems to be "return a completely blank page to the user's browser and don't log the issue".
VTiger (Score:2)
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Despite being open source, vTiger tends to follow a more "cathedral"-style development model. Major releases are few and far between, minor/bugfix releases only fix the most heinous of bugs. Rather like a lot of the more expensive proprietary software out there, now I think of it. (Aside: There's plenty of expensive proprietary software out there which makes Microsoft look like a shining beacon of excellence staffed
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I am Richie from vtiger.
Yes, of late, the release has been very late by vtiger standards. This was done so that the quality issues are addressed. Earlier on, vtiger was more date-driven and hence had compromised on the quality and user-experiences. This time around, quality is the paramount factor in mind. Hence the extended time before we release.
The last release was on 30/10/2006. It has been 7 months now since the last release. The new release is due this month and will be primarily a bug-fix release.
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It was the 30/10/2006 release I was wrestling with. To be perfectly honest with you, after a week of wrestling I was prepared to give up my IT career and grow begonias.
It's nice to know there's been some work on the quality of the product. Do you know if anything's been done to make upgrading from earlier releases more reliable?
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Yes, the 30/10/3006 build had issues. vtiger had done a lot of work in the past on the migration front but somehow it reached a peak of fiasco in that build. So I guess, you were upset.
This time around, we have been focussing a lot on the migration and also on the migrated build.
As earlier, the UI is embedded within the product and we have made some additional fixes in it as well.
We have tried to cover as many loopholes as possible this time.
As ever, things are perfect in a developer environment.
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The last vtiger release 5.0.2 was on 30/10/2006. 7 months have passed since then and we are about to release the 5.0.3 now.
I hope you will like this release.
Thanks for voicing your opinion. Appreciate it.
BTW, we are
It's the everything syndrome (Score:2)
For an all in one, compiere or opentaps. Mantis for issue/request tracking.
Trac (Score:3, Informative)
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It's wiki, rev control, etc. are all good for specific things, but they all severely lack in certain areas.
CRM and ERP (Score:1, Informative)
Try RT (Score:3, Informative)
It was what my previous employer used. It has lots of features, and is quite easy to use and setup.
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Outside of that it's a good program, but it's anything but easy to setup.
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About a year ago I wrote my own CRM system to address things RT just didn't have or didn't implement well (like the FAQ Manager addon), and ended up switching all of customer support to the in-house system.
Compiere (Score:2)
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Joe
From someone in a similar boat... (Score:2, Informative)
I'm also in a small shop with four people, we do general network planning and setup for local companies. Personally, I've been investigating the viability of TinyERP [tinyerp.com] for the job. I'd imagine that a lot of the replies received will mention the same packages as in this recent slashdot article. http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/21 25226 [slashdot.org]
I certainly won't cry dupe because I was looking for more discussion on the issue!
Enterprise Resource Planning (Score:1)
Wikipedia has a handy list of useful software at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ERP_software_ packages [wikipedia.org]. I'm looki
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Inventory/Labor Tracking and Integration (Score:1)
PSA Software (Score:2, Informative)
allocPSA and GNU Enterprise (Score:2, Informative)
allocPSA: http://www.allocpsa.org/ [allocpsa.org]
screenshots: http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?gro up_id=165183&ssid=57157 [sourceforge.net]
GNU Enterprise is another: http://www.gnuenterprise.org/ [gnuenterprise.org]
http://www.gnuenterprise.org/packages/ [gnuenterprise.org]
Filemaker is really quite great. (Score:1)
Mortgage company (Score:2)
LedgerSMB, vTiger, Joomla (Score:2)
Ledger SMB [ledgersmb.org] is a SQL Ledger fork which started out of frustrreation with unadd
Forgot to mention SUPPORT! (Score:2)
It's all jolly well to pick any kind of package that promises the earth and/or has good starting motives, but you are trusting your business to this.
The packages I listed are the ones we felt it would be possible to either get paid support for if needed, or would offer us the ability to subcontract our needs if we couldn't meet them i
Meh. (Score:2)
However: If a different Linux distro did the following I would switch right away:
A. Stay as easy to use, and require even less of the command line.
B. Allow me to just be root all the time. Or make it easier to be root in nautilus, at least.
C. Ditch the Brown.
D. Ditch Evolution for Thunderbird.
E. Make installing codecs even easier.
F. Ditto "restricted" drivers.
G. Allow me to ke
solved it (Score:2)
TimeTrex for Time and Attendance/Payroll (Score:1)
So far we haven't found anything that even comes close to the capabilities of TimeTrex [timetrex.com] and the best thing is that it is open source.
We save thousands of dollars per year compared to going with the popular payroll outsourcing companies, plus we have some pretty unique needs, so we were able to customize it a
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BB software hacked up with extra features (Score:2)
there is no ready solution ... (Score:2)
Hi,
First, whatever you get, it won't do everything you need it to; You'll have to either adapt your company's workflow, or customize the software you choose.
Second, developing your own is tricky, since it involves lots (and I mean LOTS) of coding and testing cycles (read that as time and resources) and its a bit difficult to justify.
We're in a different situations: being in a corporation, we have our own CRM, which is sold externally, so for us its a matter of eating our own dog-food.
Even in this si
Mantis for CRM (Score:1)