On Mar 26, 2006, at 11:27 PM, greg wm wrote: > hi, > > we just hired a new CFO. she's dyed in the wool MS office and > quickbooks. > > i've been deploying thunderbird here, with chilly response even before > our new CFO, and i'm proposing sql-ledger. can anyone help me answer > her challenges? To start off, I think you'll find this a MAJOR uphill battle. We use quickbooks here and I've worked with several small business's that swear by quickbooks. The thing is the support across the industry. We use it to mange taxes, payroll, everything. It has all these modules that are then supported by other entities like the bank for payroll and such. When the auditors come in every year our finance guy just hands them a cd with the quickbooks file and they support it on their laptops they bring in to load it up and go through it very easily. I've not tried to find anything, but only because bringing up the question once got such a fierce response from the boss. > > ...snip > > she has a pda that integrates easily with outlook. i've gotten folks > barely started here with the egroupware calendar, again with tepid > response. web access is important, but folks miss the outlook > integration. > > thunderbird is in the limelight, but is it actually the best player > available for winning over the hearts of these outlook lovers? is > there > better? and has our beloved world of FOS come up yet with really good > PDA integration somewhere? > I tried this once. Our exchange 2000 server had a db bomb that caused some problems and I moved all email to my debian box and actually was able to do some nice things with the spam/virus checking for a couple of weeks. I moved everyone to thunderbird with the calendar plugin and set up some webdav calendar shares. In the end the webdav calendars had major performance problems on the boss's massive calendar. It was just impossible. The lack of PocketPC sync was what finally killed it and my boss forced me to set back up the exchange server for the staff here. The nice thing was that were were previously using the exchange server for our 50 students as well and I got to keep them on the linux box. I've now setup my debian machine as the exchange server gateway so it takes care of all the spam/virus needs (instead of tacking on costly exchange extras). There are a couple of projects, but the PocketPC sync seems to always be that problematic last mile. If you do find anything I would be interested to hear your story on it. > ... > i've had my fun researching, installing, evaluating, but i think it's > time for a new strategy. i'm a bit twiddler by habit, i need some > help > getting plugged into the advocacy, planning, and management arena. i > need quick and convincing reports of what direction to take, and a > plan > of how to get there quickly. i need up-to-date references of who has > implemented what, and how it works as well or better than m$. Sorry I can't help you find something new, just wanted to let you know that you're not the first to come up against these problems and that I've only found limited success with fixing it out there. Rick