An Interesting Contrast

A couple of projects that have come my way in the last month are offering two different approaches to solving the same business problems. Both require a small office staff to have access to applications and other resources that one might need to run a small business, however, it is all different from there on in.

Project A: the brief states: 'Must work with Outlook'.  I have seen this a number of times in project briefs and in my experience, budget allowing, the client usually means 'fit the office out with Microsoft products'. I have no problem with this, Microsoft software for all the criticism leveled at it works and the packages integrate well with each other. This comes at a price however and in most cases requires significant financial investment and technical knowledge to get the most out of the system you deploy. I expect that we are going to implement remote access via VPN and terminal services, and load the server with all the applications the client needs to run their business. Interestingly, there is a requirement for a CRM and I am researching open source packages (as well as the near ubiquitous Salesforce) to see whether we can satisfy the 'Outlook' clause.

Project B: the brief states: 'I want to set up my online retail business so that I can run it from the beach' and 'we are doing this on a budget'. This is an all together more interesting project (sorry project A, but necessity is the mother of invention), though somewhat tricky to decide where to start. We will clearly be using a lot of different open source software packages. However, this is where the diversity of open source can cause problems: integrating disparate software in a way acceptable to the client and without a programming degree can be onerous. The approach we are taking is to identify the turn key packageas, in this case Drupal and Übercart, and look for other packages that integrate well though may not have the exact feature set. Interestingly for me, the client has chosen to use the paid, none open source, online version of QuickBooks. And despite the impression that it is mostly used for political campaigns and third sector organisations, we are going to use CiviCRM as the CRM. These packages integrate well out-of-the-box, so saving time and custom development time. Back office applications are being handled by a Google Business account.It is unusual to get such disimilar projects at rthe same time.  I will be writing about how things go over the next couple of months.