Happy New Year!

Best wishes to everyone who has bothered to come online and read my meagre ramblings. I hope 2009 is calmer than 2008, which I for one am glad to see the back off.

2009 will be the year when Open Source makes it's mark on the world stage. Greater use of Open Source Collaborative software, productivity and enterprise management will hit either hit the headlines and roll off the shelf like never before.

More to follow...

Desktop of the Future...

I've started a discussion on Linkedin.com called about the desktop of the future.

You'll find it here. Please join in and contribute is it's shaping up to be quite an interesting discussion.

Pet Hates

Cold weather, processed cheese, bad economics...companies to claim to provide a wonderful service, yet pay no heed when they are criticised.

Open Source companies need as much good PR as they can muster. The giants of the IT industry have huge marketing budgets, journalists in their pockets and bamboozling messages that leave you with no choice than to want their product and continue to pay for support and upgrades.

You might say the public are gullible but coming from the Contact Centre industry, I know first hand how much the giants value their customers because the customers pay the bills, vote with their pound/dollar/yen lined feed and if they don't like it, they go elsewhere. So stability and reliability of software are vastly important and not over looked.

Two weeks ago I tested some online collaboration software with a friend. It claimed to be a industry beating solution to the age old problem of sharing documents and desktop sharing to many participants for free. Web conferences are something many of us have participated in, some of us have even hosted them and the worst thing is when you have arranged people to attend a conference, where they have given up their valuable time and not only does it not work, but it's embarrassing. You're on the back foot. you've egg on your face and the kudos that you've build up to that point goes straight out the window, leaving you back at square one and your participants wondering whether they're onto a good thing or should they deal with someone who can deliver the goods.

So when a company says we can beat the best and at a fraction of the cost (£$) it's a compelling business proposition and I've got to look.

So my friend and I kicked off the conference. I setup and sent the invite. The invite did arrive by email and the link was dutifully click.

And clicked..

And clicked...

And I send the invite again and it arrived. And again the link was clicked.

And clicked...

And again it was clicked...

You get the picture. I wish I had. This software had the potential to be earth shatteringly good, a revolution based on Open Source. But we gave up and I sent an email to them to let them know what my experience was.

Did they get back to me??

NO. They haven't responded. I never received a response, not an acknowledgement. Nothing.

And this is what gets me. A company, regardless of who they are, thinking they have it made but are so arrogant that they don't listed to their customers. If I had been running that company, I'd be hungry for feedback. Good and back.

"Tell us what happened?"
"How did you feel?"
"What could have been different?"
"What would have made your experience better?"

Some acknowledgement would be nice. Some later feedback to say they took my comments on board and have incorporated them into the system.

I fear my email went into a black hole, like most it problems in IT, they are cured by the switch it off, switch it on mentality. But as this was a SaaS solution, it's not so easy.

So please Open Sourcers, if this is you and you want to challenge the Gold Gate big dogs, listen you your customers and value what they say and act!

How to implement low cost Citrix clients in your business

With cash conservation being key in business, there is a need for all business owners and managers to evaluate their IT and ensure that they are getting the maximum return from their IT investments, that the tools are enabling workers to meet the needs of the business and the goals of the business and that overall, there is a quantifiable return on investment.

The current economic climate means that reductions in capital spend are inevitable. If you're a business owner, you'll be sitting on your hands and taking things one day at a time. You will only invest money (1) if you have it, and (2) if your business needs it. With the use of Open Source software, the capital outlay and ongoing costs for an IT solution are greatly reduced due to software cost negation which often follows through to minimal support costs.

For Citrix, it's typically the case that the initial capital outlay is higher than traditional desktop deployments but it's cheaper in the long run to support. I was implementing Citrix at a company and was determined to ensure that the per seat cost was going to be equal to or less than the traditional Citrix solution.

What I set out to do was to engage with my local reseller to get the lowest cost desktop cost possible. I spoke with Dell and even tried to buy their cheapest home PC. Why?

I wanted to run Linux on the desktops and effectively turn them into dumb terminal that would connect to Citrix Presentation Server. The supplier eventually agreed to purchase pallets of second user PC's from a company that specialises in reconditioned units. The devices were old Compaq Deskpro EN SFF devices, the added a keyboard, mouse and 17" flat screen.

Cost per desktop: £140

The software that was installed was Linux Thinstation. Thinstation is a thin client Linux distribution that makes a normal PC a full-featured thin client supporting all major connectivity protocols: Citrix ICA, NoMachine NX, 2X ThinClient, MS Windows terminal services (RDP), Cendio ThinLinc, Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250, VMS term and SSH.

The cost of designing the solution was approx: 2 days. Let's say that was £200.

Divide that design cost by 600 which was the number of desktops that benefited from it is 0.33p per desktop.

Add that to the cost of the desktop and for hardware and software, it comes in a miniscule £140.33p per machine.

I could not get a cheaper and more reliable solution anywhere. And after 3 years, it is still going strong.

There are always alternatives such as 2X Virtual Computing Software where you can get free clients from the deployment their 2X ThinClientServer free edition. And if you click on the links around my Blog, I'm sure you'll uncover some more nuggets of useful information.

Collanos Software: Project Collaboration

I had Microsoft in to see me once. They were selling the benefits of the full range of Office products. Live Meeting was nice but didn't meet our needs of cross firewall meetings.OCS was good but a bit behind in what I was interested in (VoIP/IM/Video Conferencing all in one were my goal). Of interest though was Groove 2007. Groove 2007 is a clever tool for collaborating with co-workers and external parties. The local reseller who accompanied Microsoft was telling me how he used Groove 2007 to share documents and chat with his external Partner Account Manager. It was all very slick and made sense. I thought about how this could be 'given' to clients as a value added service and how it would make communication much more transparent.

Value Add to some is cost to others. I didn't take it to the stage of putting a case together as it's a difficult number to quantify. How do you put an actual price on value added service? You could look at the customer satisfaction abut there needs to be tangible evidence to prove that your investment of $229 per user (for example) was well worth the effort. Add on top of that the design, development, implementation and ongoing support and the total cost of that piece of Value Add spirals out of control.

The Open Source alternative that ticks my boxes is Collanos Workplace. Collanos works in the similar way. It can be used to share files, discussions, task assignment, notes and URLs. The premise is simple. You create a 'Workspace' or project folder on your machine and then invite your colleagues to participate in the Workspace. Then you add items to your Workspace. And here's the clever bit. When you add or make a change to a file, they are replicated to the users you invited to that workspace. Which means that everyone has the same documents and are all in sync.

Where can it be used? Projects where you have a client that is outside of your firewall. You might be working on a project plan and everyone needs the current version. As soon as it's updated, it gets synced to all the other participants so everyone has all the information to hand.

Perhaps you are holding a virtual meeting and are taking minutes. Once they are saved in the Workspace, they are replicated to all participants in that Workspace. You might say that these could just be emailed and that is true. But most will store their attachments in email, not file them properly or maybe delete them. This way, they are contained in the same structure and everyone has online and offline access to them.

The downside was that the performance was sometimes a bit sketchy. I noticed that it did slow with some file types. But all in all, it's an excellent piece of software and worthy of consideration in your corporate communication and project management strategy.

Collanos can be found at http://www.collanos.com.

Office Groove 2007 can be found at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/groove/FX100487641033.aspx.

Selling the benefits...

One of the projects that I will be running throughout this Blog will be to build and create a virtual Open Source operate business, run totally on Free Open Source software. It's one thing to be able to talk about the tools but it's another to prove how they can coexist. The big players in business have marketing budgets, teams of ad men pacing boardrooms doing SWOT analysis and brain storming the message and brand. Open Source development teams (sometimes it's just one person!) don't normally have or want that luxury. They want to develop quality software and leave it up to the public to decide. They might get reviews in journals and blogs (like this) and might be surviving through Donations. They may be geographically dispersed teams collaborating through various means, possibly driven by the frustrations that sometimes come from untested release to market software that simply doesn't work.

All too often in Business, I get asked the question "...but is it compatible?". And the answer is more often than not, a resounding yes. An example of this is Freemind. I used the excellent MindManager from Mindjet in a previous company and when faced with a need for Mind Mapping software, I realised that Mindet wasn't available but a quick search lead me to Freemind. It does exactly what I need from a Mind Mapping tool but at no cost. It's compatible in every way required and with PDF generation available was an instant hit. Time to go viral.

I informed a colleague, who instructed her willing team to try it and low and behold, it's been downloaded, installed in a typical Microsoft Windows based office environment and so far, it's holding it's own.

Compatibility is mostly down to a users willingness to change or not. If you can sell the benefits and do your own internal marketing and establish the appropriate level of user training, the compatibility question will significantly diminish. so do your user needs analysis, dispel the myths, sell the benefits and you'll find yourself with happy users and a very happy financial controller.

All4Roo is about Open Source.
Most organisations use proprietary software. Microsoft still dominates the operating system and productivity suites through their aggressive sales and marketing strategy and fair play to them.
But things are changing and have been for sometime. Open Source software has been gaining prominence for some time, though it's in the back office where it's really made it's mark. Linux, Apache and JBoss are standard nowadays. But it's at the user desktop where the real gains will be and the revolution will happen.

From where I sit, managers in business don't trust Open Source and therefore don't want to change to it. The IT Crowd in the sealed room are fans and know what it can do and how it can do it. But I've yet to find many who can bridge the gap and understand the systems and sell them.

Whilst I have experience of this, I don't have all the answers. I hope to learn as much from this Blog as I hope everyone else will.

I'm going to start by listing the Open Source alternatives to all the lovely applications that we use on a day to day basis at home or in the office.

Feel free to contribute or send your ideas and stories. Stories are particularly welcome if you have experienced a successful business transformation from proprietary to Open Source.