[FM Discuss] Beyond manuals

Wed Apr 8 11:59:52 PDT 2009

Hi Adam,

I think this is a great idea, an intro to what does what, how it is 
useful and testimonials could be aligned with relavant chapters (e.g. I 
use open office Calc because..., I use open office writer..., open 
office impress..., you could even include I use evolution because... and 
I use gnucash because... if it were to include the full range of 
office/business admin tools)

Cheers,

John

adam hyde wrote:
> it wouldnt take us much to set up a manual to tackle this situation. we
> could outline what softwares do what with maybe a chapter a piece. we
> dont need to go into how to use the software, but maybe we could include
> some testimonials from business people saying 'I use open office
> because ...'
>
> what do u think john?
>
> adma
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 07:07 +1200, John & Melonie Curwood wrote:
>   
>> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
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>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>>       
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