[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

[John & Melonie Curwood]

Andy Oram wrote:
> I've been silent for a couple days, but now I have an evening to answer FM-related mail and start working on the command-line manual again.
>
> John's idea below sounds like a really nice project, although a big one. To give businesses enough information about all the tools for them to feel confident they can trust their businesses to free software, you'd have to say a lot about each tool.
>   
With regards to businesses needing enough information to feel confident 
I would say yes and no about needing to say alot for all the tools.  For 
the software that handles the accounts/inventory/invoicing I would 
definitely say that something very thorough would be required, when 
dealling with Money and accurately and securely keeping track of it 
business owners want assurance that a product will do the job.
But for the rest, in my experience most business owners think very 
little about what they use and most have a very small understanding of 
what they are using.  For example the majority of bosses and managers 
that I have had would have used MS excel only for making tables, which a 
spreadsheet is not very good at.compared to the table functions in most 
word processors.  That is what the see the spreadsheet is good for.
When talking about an office suite, I think something that would say 
"Hey OpenSource Software can do everything MS Office can do and it's 
easy to learn how" would be what is needed.  I think the biggest barrier 
to implementing a new system is the fact that people don't like change, 
they don't want to have to learn a new system.  When I first bought a 
Mac I was so excited about it, I thought the way it worked was really 
cool, and the fact that it never crashed was fantastic, so I went around 
all my friends and family preaching the virtues of iMacs and OSX, but 
whenever they tried using my computer, it always came back to 'it 
doesn't work the same as windows', 'I can't use the same shortcuts as in 
windows', etc.  And in the end not one of them converted, they all 
appreciated the fact that things ran smother on the Mac but were 
prepared to keep putting up with random crashes and program freezes 
rather than have to learn a new system. And I think this is one of the 
major hurdles for getting business to adopt open sourced software, they 
would rather put up with the same bugs in their current software than 
have to learn something new.
Woops sorry about all the exposition, but I think when trying to promote 
the use of Free Software in a business situation, the emphasis should be 
on how smooth the transition can be and how easy it is to learn the new 
software.

Cheers,

John
> This reminds me that a few years ago I tried to pull together a book about the value of open source software and open formats (two different but related issues) for government. At first I thought I would propose it at O'Reilly, but we decided we couldn't sell enough copies to make money, so I tried to organize it as a collaborative project covering multiple continents (sound familiar?). That didn't work.
>
> It was an advocacy book, not a how-to book, but the goal was similar: to persuade frightened office managers to make the migration.
>
> Andy
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "John & Melonie Curwood" <marketing at lovinglearning.co.nz>
> To: discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 9:36:18 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: [FM Discuss] Beyond manuals
>
> With regards to an OpenOffice manual, maybe create a doing stuff with 
> free software manual about running a small business or something which 
> would include Openoffice, something like mozilla thunderbird/sunbird or 
> evolution for email/organising and something like gnucash or better (I'm 
> not familiar with OpenSource Accounting packages) for doing the accounts.
>
> I know it is not as exciting as say the digital foundations book, but it 
> could have quite a wide audience.
>
> As some one said earler it would take more that a sprint to put and 
> Openoffice manual together, more like a marathon, or in this case maybe 
> a triathlon. :)
>
> Cheers,
>
> John
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