Design a Virtual Office with Open Source? 263
apropos asks: "An interesting question came up recently when discussing (yet again) starting an open-source based consulting company: 'How would you design the ultimate virtual office with open source software?' With things like fax, VoIP, web, email, security and office suites all available as open source products, what kind of useful things could be done? One idea that came to mind was emailing answering machine recordings. What would you put into your ultimate virtual office solution?"
Easy... (Score:3, Funny)
Better Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Set up consultancy firm
2) Ask slashdot
3) Profit
Emacs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Emacs (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Emacs (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Emacs (Score:5, Funny)
What about Asterisk (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:2, Interesting)
That's not including the ISDN PRI that you going to have split into 24 different trunks, either...
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:2)
What do you need PRI for that you can't get with plain old channelized t1?
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:5, Informative)
I have less than $300 and have three internal extensions and one external line. A comparable pbx would be much more expensive and MUCH less flexible. I've been able to do with Asterisk in about 30 minutes what would have taken months of C programming on any decent PBX (and a $10k developer license).
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:5, Interesting)
its really cool to see how far its all come (yeah, XML-RPC!!) and yet its so much one of those 'hidden success of linux' stories.
its like, the operating system that was so good at doing what it does, everyone forgets its even there, or what it is. "never mind the 'war for desktop', who is taking care of the telephones, and the billing, where is the 'policy' computer, etc?" heh heh
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:2)
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:5, Informative)
Asterisk is much more flexible than working everything directly through the phone company, and can save a bundle on not having to pay for extra features at the Central Office level. After all, in some areas a channelized T1 with 24 trunks (think 12 in & 12 out) is cheaper than twelve centrex lines with all of the features. When you compare this over the long run, this savings, coupled with the lower hardware costs, can make a full featured phone system ROI _very_ quickly for the virtual office environment.
(Hints: Ask your phone company to let you colo the box so you don't have to pay the local loop charge for the T1. Also be sure to ask what it would cost to go ahead and split two of the 64k channels out for Internet access so you can administer it remotely without having to use a modem.)
Re:What about Asterisk (Score:3, Informative)
In my newly formed office, where there are developers/sales/finance people working out of their home offices in Toronto, Boston, Vancouver, NY, and LA, we opted to go for the Telco features as it's a truly virtual system. We have a North American toll-free number that people can call, and it gives you the usual "welcome to our company... sales press 1, tech support press 2, company directory press 3", etc.
At that point, it will hunt down an individual or series of
I just gave a talk on Asterisk! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're interested, the slides and notes from the talk are here: Fun with Asterisk and Perl [moertel.com].
The talk was for the Pittsburgh Perl Mongers and shows a four examples:
- text-to-speech
- dial the weather
- web form that sets up a call
- web form that sets up a conference
Asterisk is fun stuff and worth a look.Netoffice (Score:3, Interesting)
Off the top of my head.. (Score:5, Interesting)
What would be useful?
emailing answering machine recordings.. I don't think so. Emailing the entire answering machine recording could backfire. That could easily be used as a DoS against someone's email box ("Let's all leave a message for that ass Professor Doofus tonight!")
Not that I get a lot of faxes these days (read: "the 21st century") but it would be nice to have software that would OCR a fax then email the text to me (this one is simple enough that it probably already exists) == Less paper.
If a company were large enough to have a mail room, then scanning in snail mail and emailing images would be neat. One could always fetch the hard copy if needed. I'm far more efficient with electronic files than I am with paper. (My desk is a pigsty)
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I use PayTrust [slashdot.org] for my bills - they do exactly this. What they can get electronically, they do, but any other bills go to their address and get scanned in. I get an email with highlighted information (date due, minimum payment, total payment, etc) and can set up automatic payment rules (for example, "Pay celphone bill unless its over $120 - if it is, then email me first"). And it works on anything, even little scraps of paper.
Pretty cool stuff, and very friendly.
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:2)
Maybe, but you would have to be pretty hard up to do so. Most voice recordings that I get on my email are about 50 KB (Don't forget 8kbps mono signals that come from voice modems aren't exactly high quality or large) How much is a large'ish HDD? 160GB? Try filling that in a hurry.
vgetty provides this functionality.
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Or better yet, use voice-recognition software to translate the message to text, and send it to my email. I can read (or skim) faster than I can listen. Of course, I'd also want the recording (which wouldn't take up much space, as someone else already pointed out) in case someone left a phone number and the software didn't translate it correctly.
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:2)
Add in a filter to regex your favorite keywords or by caller id and instant sorting.
We use hylafax quite extensively at the office. We are not into phase 2 yet which aims at removing all incoming hard copy. Pretty much when I get time to finish the roll out we should move to this.
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:3, Informative)
You are running in mostly the right direction it seems.
We have two methods for the print-to-fax gateway.
The first, available for any systems, involes an smb print share. This print share via cups uses sambafax. http://www.purpel3.com/sambafax/sambafax_6B.html Essentially, it just parses the postscript file and takes out the send number. It's fairly basic and relies
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:2, Interesting)
You have a good point. I'd use Caller ID and send myself e-mail telling me when the message was received and who it was from.
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:2)
Decent EDMS do imaging,storage and workflow right now. Email is too crude - works for messaging but not for true information management when meta-data is all important
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:2)
OCR a fax then email the text -
www.efax.com - incoming faxes are converted to tiff pitcures and emailed to you
www.fax1.com - email files (PDF, WORD, text, etc) to be transmitted to a real fax machine at a specified number
scanning in snail mail and emailing images - this just sounds
Re:Off the top of my head.. (Score:4, Informative)
Thats what I get with my mp3s and OGG files! I have a good quality void recording of a comedian. I've stored it on my hard drive using Speex [speex.org], which is an OSS codec that's designed for speech. It takes up less than 346KB per minute of recording. This figure could be pushed even lower if you were recording from a telephone as sound quality wouldn't matter so much as it will already have been heavily compressed.
People. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:People. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:People. (Score:2)
At least I still have some self respect and dignity.
..because it fits so well... (Score:3, Funny)
BOB SLYDELL: So what you do is you take the specifications from the customers and you bring them down to the software engineers?
TOM: That, that's right.
BOB PORTER: Well, then I gotta ask, then why can't the customers just take the specifications directly to the software people, huh?
TOM: Well, uh, uh, uh, because, uh, engineers are not good at dealing with
customers.
BOB SLYDELL: You physically take the specs from the customer?
TOM: Well, no
Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Funny)
Laptops (secretaries) are expensive
Hmm... which one to choose?
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Funny)
And by 'that', I mean your username.
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a place for a decorative "dumb blonde." That's Fortune 500 CEO stuff.
In a small, virtual, high tech company doing most of its work/business over internet/phone the assistants should be among the sharpest people you've got working for you, and payed for it.
They'll pay back their high salaries in triplicate. Thus they're cheap. The reduction of the assistant to a "seceratary" is one of the greatest tragedies of the corporate world.
KFG
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Your point is valid for companies that have > 3 people and are (more) secure financially but I will be without physical office for a while and need to hire good technologists first.
So the original question, how can I use my existing or modified infrastructure and intelligent software to help cover that gap until then?
I am working on building the tools I need and I love open source for this. People have touched on great packages such as mgetty and I would add wiki, egroupware (fork of phpgroupware), squirrel mail, horde, etc. etc.
I am building a suite of tools that I am giving back to the community (as they are based on open source tools to begin with) that may be a nice package for virtual office needs. See rexiliusgroup.com for some of the code (still being developed).
What the other AC said (Score:2, Insightful)
The phone's gonna ring. Are you going to answer it every time, interrupt your train of thought, and devote your attention to juggling it? Or are you going to dump all your incoming calls into voicemail and deal with them one day per week?
If you don't have a lot of cash, try paying your assistant the same thing that you're paying yourself: a chunk of equity along
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Bingo! And your hours are more valuable taking care of those things that only you can take care of than they are taking your clothes to the cleaners and picking them up again, and all those thousand and one little tasks that the modern "seceratary" has been taught to refuse to do.
I've known salesman who payed assistants out of their own pocket when the company refused to provide one, because their time selling was worth more than the time doing the things the assistant did for them. And I'm not talking about million dollar a year salesman. I'm talking about people in their first year or two in the trade making $20k themselves if they were lucky.
Yes, startup is tough. You thought you were through living on Ramen noodles and sleeping on a hand-me-down sofa bed when you got out of school, didn't you? Now you've got all that again, plus the fact that you'll spend many a night tossing on that sofa bed wondering how in the hell you're going to make Friday's payroll.
You rich, bloody capitalist pig you.
Even so, you'll find that you're better off in the long run (like, within a year) hiring one technologist and one assistant than hiring two technologists, because that assistant will be leveraged into more, and better, work by both yourself and your technologist. The affect it can have on morale alone is astounding.
Use the software for what software can legitimately do. Like connect you with your technologists, and them with your customers. But use people for what only people can do, like making sure you never run out of toner, and thus lose hours of valuable work time while you chase after more instead of chasing after customers or getting the print job out by deadline.
Go to your local college and find a CE sophmore who'll take a part time internship for $7.50/hr, 10 hrs/wk.
Don't lie to them. Tell them they're going to be the office schlub for a startup with dubious finances and future. If they take the job they'll bust their ass for you with a smile on their face.
Just be sure to reward them when you've reached the point where you can. They'll be yours for life if you do that.
They'll piss all over you if you don't, and you'll deserve it.
And yes, I'll have a look at your software.
KFG
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:2)
I will have to think about that. I just got my first 3 clients and am about ready to cut the funding cord (my day job). I dont have that much many set aside for someone elses salary yet but maybe I should factor that in to my business plan.
Yet another thing I enjoy about the OS community, free advice!
Re:Hmmm.. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's really cool technology and continues to amaze everyone we show it to, so I'm surprised that it's not yet fully commonplace.
For an open source solution? Hmmm... good luck?
Linmodems (Score:5, Interesting)
Citing the site:
# Think telephone emulation (put the audio card into full duplex, and talk to the linmodem with it).
# Think telephone with a backspace key (use the linmodem to dial for you).
# Think smart telephone: "That line is busy. Do you want me to retry in five minutes?"
# Think "voice dialling".
# Think "soft pbx". Equip enough machines in an office for all the outside lines. Then do IP telephone inter-office, and go to a linmodem when you need an outside line.
# Think answering machine.
# Think pager interface. Your answering machine takes the call, phones your pager company and pages you).
# Think "contact database with integral dialler, and answering machine recognition".
# Think "call recording with no off-hook click".
# Think message detail recorder (basically a record of all time spent on the phone. Great for billing.
I guess mailing voice recording wouldn't be hard.
Re:Linmodems (Score:2)
However, you can setup such a system using vgetty included in the mgetty package with a voice/modem/fax. Sending the fax and the voice message is the easy part of the setup.
What would be much difficult, it's playing with the DTMF script to enable the system to behave like a automated-attendant. You can have it page you when someone leaves an urgent message or even call you on your cellphone (if you have one and don't want to give your number to everyone) and play the mess
wireless services (Score:5, Insightful)
Its nice to be able to sit with a client at lunch and run a security scan and site survey from your PDA and fax the results back to him so they are waiting in his office when he gets back.
I am building those tools for my fledgling company and used some of them today at a client site.
openoffice (Score:2)
but then again just like in windows and MS Office you will always need add-ons for your specific needs, i would say there is no "1 office suite" that can definitely fill your needs (that is if you want to do more than the standard stuff)
Re:openoffice (Score:2)
VOIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VOIP (Score:3, Informative)
The Digium cards seem a mght expensive, but there are definately cheaper then channel banks. But don't worry the Asterisk software can handle H.323, SIP and IAX (asterisk's own VoIP protocol). So you can use hard phone, soft phones and hard soft phones?!? (e.g. Cisco VoIP phone)
I've installed two of the PSTN (FXO) cards, and phone (TDM) card in a spare server with Asterisk. The cards sound and work g
Re:VOIP (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, the digium cards, plus computer hardware, plus voip phones running with Asterisk all together is still far cheaper than a normal VoIP system (say, 3Com or NEC), or a voicemail-equiped digital (non-voip) phone system. Plus you get a ton more features and flexibility than you could ever possibly have in a closed system.
The unreachability service (Score:2, Funny)
Then if somebody still tried to reach you, an automated voice or fax or email, as the case may be, would tell them: "I'm trying to have some quiet time here DAMMIT!"
The ability to be unreachable anywhere would be a terrific option for cell phone owners.
Re:The unreachability service (Score:3, Insightful)
No one forces you to take your cell phone with you at all times, or to actually have it turned on if you do have it with you. If you've been trained to salivate every time a bell rings, well, untrain yourself, we have that advantage over dogs.
Yes, I know your post was a joke, but it's one of those jokes that's funny because of its ultimate truth.
The power of control was with you all along. Just click yo
Re:The unreachability service (Score:2, Funny)
Easy... (Score:5, Funny)
spreadsheet data analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Open-source virtual office? (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, I
Now if my virtual office were a musicological research library with full support for searching through massive databases of scores,
Usability (Score:5, Interesting)
One word: Usability.
Open Source is wonderful for what it is, its principles are beautiful, its spirit is clean, and it is absolutely no good to end users as it stands today.
Applications do not look the same, nor do they work the same. KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice. They want something that works, and where every application looks the same and works the same. They also do not care about recompiling their kernel every time they buy some hardware, or recompiling software to alter some setting only available compile-time.
Whatever functionality (which is normally Open Source developers' focus) the office solution gives, it is absolutely worthless if it takes a Ph.D. in Rocket Science (or two hours of trial-and-failure) to understand how to reach the wanted end results.
So usability would be my primer choice for end result.
I dare not count how many Open Source projects actually start out creating a logo, a hompeage, and an implementation of themes, a particularly pointless feature. Somehow that says everything. For most of them, anyways.
Re:Usability (Score:3, Insightful)
So pick KDE or GNOME, and only use apps that are particular to one or agnostic to either. Don't tell the users that the other exists, and like you said, they won'
Re:Usability (Score:2, Insightful)
KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice.
If they do not care about choice (and I don't think that's true of all of them, or even most, or things like skins wouldn't exist in the first place), that's not a problem: in a business environment, the choice of UI is made by the IT department, not the end users. They will choose either Gnome or KDE, as they see fit. The end user, if unfamiliar
Re:Usability (Score:2, Insightful)
I only use Mozilla but I have to support IE too. It is much easier to configure proxies in IE because I can type the address once and check a box that says use this address for all proxies. But in Mozilla/NS I have to type it in repeatedly. Not a big deal until you do it a hundred times over the course of a year.
I also have a beef with Mozilla over ano
Re:Usability (Score:2)
Konqueror in kde 3.2.1 is also a nice improvement it renders faster and more correctly then it did before. Overall in my experience it is a tossup as to which browser konqueror/mozilla is more standards compliant some stuff one does better and some stuff the other does better.
Re:Usability (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike proprietary software, they dont have to memorize how the vendor wants them to use the application, they tell me and I make it work for them how they want it. That usability model is also different.
Not to say that many open source packages don't suck as end-user tools, but everyone has different ideas of usability and its strength is that I can make it fit those ideas.
Re:Usability (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of us start a project that is useful for us only, later we found that it can be useful for other people, then we make our software Open Source, for everybody to use, share and modify.
We are not about users, we are about sharing. You can modify it if you don't like it, it works for me. OSS people are very kind and care about their users, but their users don't help, they always keep yelling out lo
The people resources (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you pay people you not only can't see daily, but possibly may have never even met in person? How can you check up on the current state of your operation?
Re:The people resources (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell your people what to do or tell them how to do it, but not both. If you have to do both, you're doing something wrong and probably shouldn't be in a leadership position anyways. This will teach your underlings some initiative and help them develop sound judgement. If someone doesn't know h
email voice messages - linux (Score:5, Informative)
downloads messages via the web so that they can be played anywhere. Uses perl and python.
Works very well, I have used it for over 3 years.
And of course, it's GPL licensed, and downloadable at vocp.sourceforge.net.
PK
For the voicemail-to-email setup (Score:2)
Still perfectly easy to understand especially if you often get messages from people that go, "oh.....yeah
Well, I just use winamp with one of those DSP plugins with the little slider that affects the speed and not the pitch.... but an encoder that does it by default would be nice.
A smart encoder with a 20 percent spe
Features (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think all received faxes should be saved to hard disk and previewed before being printed to prevent wasting paper. But I'm not sure how easy this is to implement currently with open source.
Re:Features (Score:2)
(IMAP so that multiple people can have access to a central "fax" account)
I would put... (Score:5, Funny)
An open source secretary.
Diego Rey
Re:I would put... (Score:3, Funny)
Source....maybe not (Score:2, Funny)
Start an IP forfeiture firm... (Score:3, Funny)
I bet their competitors would pay you a good bit of money for this service.
Drat! I'm falling victim to my own idea by even posting this consulting idea!
Accounting or Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
But that's just an example. It could have been something else. It could be Illustrator. Or Photoshop (yes, I Love The GIMP, but I'd switch if Photoshop was free). The productivity of users in the long run is far more significant than even, say, a $15,000 accounting package.
My wife is currently taking the Becker/Conviser course in preparation for her CPA exam. Yup, we have to have Windoze for the practice software. Fortunately, OpenOffice runs very nicely on her XP box.
I think that, as long as you're prepared to build and *support* heterogeneous systems with perhaps a blend of "Whatever The End User Needs", you are fine. You can suggest ways to save money, but keep your eye on productivity - it's arguable to me that OpenOffice is in some ways *better* than MS Office, for example. If you walk in *telling* users they should be happy with, say, Abiword, you're already on the wrong foot, IMHO.
Mark
The Ultimate Tech's dream (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The Ultimate Tech's dream (Score:4, Interesting)
a virtual secretary (Score:2, Funny)
Please don't forget the following... (Score:4, Interesting)
- X10 controller
- SmartHome.Com [smarthome.com]
- web-based X10 controller [kevinboone.com]
- Complete listing of X10 software [x10ideas.com]
- Linux-based HomeVision [wanadoo.nl]
- GNU Automaton [gnu.org]
- an established IPv6 tunnel with your own IPv6 address subnet (it's a whole new world out there)
- SMS server for your cell-phone (good with X10)
- X10 event to your SMS phone [jabberwocky.com] (via paging)
- Control X10 from your WAP cellphone [f9.co.uk]
- Mobile IP server for your roving laptop
and as a tribute toward the fabled CMU Trojan Room Coffee webcam lore...Coffee Maker [cam.ac.uk] (this one needs an Java-Dispenser SNMP agent [agentpp.com] badly)
We're almost there...
Hey (Score:4, Funny)
This might be a starting point... (Score:2)
The have some interesting products...
Been thinking about this for a while now... (Score:5, Interesting)
1a. File-sharing across multiple locations. Haven't done this because bandwidth isn't quite cheap enough yet, but perhaps in the near future, I'll be setting up rsync'd shares between the 3 locations so we can work from the same file base. Hasn't been a problem when working on separate projects but with more joint projects, it is starting to get messy with people keeping their own project directories.
1b. Search interface to files. Heirarchical file structures suck for trying to find things. Good for filing once, but I reckon I could retreive files quicker with a google-like interface. So, I want a prebuilt web front end that can automatically provide a search interface to samba shares. I should be able to treat each share as a collection, so I can chose to search just one collection or many. This would be very useful.
Personally, I want to work towards the following solution.
* samba shares of heirarchical folders that can be mapped and synced to laptops
* a web search interface to the samba shares that understands doc/xls/pdf etc a la htdig
* rsync to maintain similar shares across multiple sites
Alternatively, it would be interesting to investigate peer-to-peer as an alternative - as long as files could still be synced to go on the road. Cool P2P features would be to define how many copies should be stored of each file on the network (to force backup) and to have the primary files migrate to where they are used the most to cut down bandwidth transfers.
2. Groupware - I've been meaning to look at the OSS groupware packages available, because with more shared projects, we need a centralised way of managing projects, tasks, calendars and contacts. These should be able to be accessed from Outlook ideally (Outlook 2003 is pretty good I have to admit). It would be nice to have faxes received via a modem in a linux box arrive in the groupware where appropriate staff can access them from wherever they are at the time. The groupware would naturally be a good home for the web interface to the samba file shares.
3. Office software - OpenOffice.org appears to lack the ability to track changes - essential for multiple people working on a project. Compare document is not enough. You need to be able to identify changes, and add comment bubbles for the development and review process. Additionally OOo needs to have a basic project management tool, drawing tool, and even a note taking tool a la MS Project, Visio and OneNote. That would cover most business needs.
4. Security phpki looks interesting and useful for managing email certs. Naturally most network communication should be encrypted between locations with SSH tunnels or similar.
5. Intelligence. Haven't seen anything like this but it would be very very useful for any business. There needs to be a web interface to an intelligence gathering and searching tool. So I hear that "so-and-so is planning to do this" I can record it in a database. Later, someone could search for so-and-so and be provided with the gossip from the different sources within the organisation. Could be a very useful tool. Perhaps something like an OSS version of the NSA's Intelink software - a means of providing, sharing and searching business intelligence.
6. Timesheet. A good OSS web based timesheeting system would be very useful.
7. NNTP. Thats right, I want to use good ole newsgroups. I tried web forums, but they didn't go down well because you had to be online. With NNTP you can use an offline reader, and reply offline. I reckon I can get my technophobe partners to use that because its so similar to email. Email is a bane for internal communication because of the cc's and everyone archiving mail. It would be easier to move as much as possible to a newsserver and use email only for direct communication between two people. Then a web interface from the intranet would be nice as well!
I'm not asking for too much am I?
Re:Been thinking about this for a while now... (Score:4, Informative)
OpenOffice.org has all of these features. I've used OOo to write one book and edit a couple of others. Now I'm using it to write another one for a major publisher (Addison-Wesley), and will need to go through at least a couple of rounds of edits by several different people, complete with comment bubbles and the rest, not to mention handling a whole bunch of illustrations that include screenshots, photos, and charts/graphs. For note-taking I have a whole raft of open source alternatives.
I'll be interacting with MS Office users all the way, too, and I expect no problems since I've done this before and it worked out fine.
- Robin
Re:Been thinking about this for a while now... (Score:3, Interesting)
Cheers Gav
Re:Been thinking about this for a while now... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Been thinking about this for a while now... (Score:4, Informative)
The more and more complex your documentation, notes, and filesystem becomes, the more you realise that you need a Wiki to organise it all. If you want to have lots of people collaborating on a document, tracking changes, writing comments, and re-using text between documents, then word processors by themselves simply aren't capable enough, but that's something an internal Wiki excels in.
As to drawing tools, I can't believe we're talking about the same products. Where I work, OpenOffice has one of the best drawing tools I've ever used, whereas Microsoft Office doesn't have anything. We've got engineers trying to do technical drawing in MS-Word, and you wouldn't believe how ugly the results are. Visio would be nice, but it's not part of MS-Office, it's 150-400 GBP extra. Can someone who's used both tell me why Visio is worth so much more money? And anyone who says 'because it's part of MS-Office' doesn't know enough about Visio's history.
As to note-taking, what is it that you're so sure OpenOffice *must have* before you'll look at it? You have some sort of company where people open up Microsoft note-taking software when they receive a phone call rather than using a text-editor or word-processor or a postit note like everyone else? Do you take your computers into meetings and try to take notes on that?
Project management? Even the most hardcore Microsoft-users in our office are baulking at the idea of paying 400-500 GBP per-person, per-computer for a project planning tool. Not that they'd ever consider using anything other than Microsoft Project, of course.
mp3 player && telephone (Score:3, Interesting)
Maintainability - The AK47 Virtual Office (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the most important thing is not usability as an earlier poster claimed though that is important but maintainability. Owners of small businesses with a dozen employees can't afford to have a full time network or systems administrator. So the responsibility usually falls on someone who is an engineer or administrative assistant but who is more interested in computer stuff than their average co-worker. If you put together a package that requires them to call you back in at $120 an hour everytime something strange happens, it will put the brakes on adoption. Make your money and your reputation on doing installs and never needing to come back. Make your product and service the AK-47 of the SOHO world. BTW, if any readers don't know, the M-16 has better range and accuracy but jams when not cleaned regularly whereas the AK rifle can be dragged through swamps and get sand and mud in the chamber yet keep on firing happily, at least that is the reputation. (If any godless communists with personal experience with it want to correct me, feel free.)
As for specific cool ideas... Take the voicemail to email one step further: maybe you could get voice recognition software to translate the message to words (or just phonemes when it is unsure of a word), send that to email, and act as a proxy allowing a reply email from, for example a two way pager, to be translated back into speech by voice synthesis software, then redial the original number found by callerID, read off the reply and ask for a certain touchtone or the word 'confirmed' to be said if the correct recipient got the reply. Like this:
Re:Maintainability - The AK47 Virtual Office (Score:3, Funny)
Grandma drops the phone and crys "Oh No! I knew I should have gotten that policy with Old Glory. [queenkv.org] Now the metal ones are coming for me and I don't have any insurance."
Emailing voicemail (Score:2, Informative)
several (Score:2)
- a groupware system with web interface, native client, sync, etc.
- custom web-based applications development services
- bonus: network transparency (move whole shebang onto servers at the client's location without a lot of grief, if they so desire)
Virtual Information (Score:2, Interesting)
And why is it a virtual office, of you use physical computers? If it is the work place at home, call it Soho, or call it the workplace of a telecommuter, but I dont see what the virtual here is, besides a disturbing buzz-word.
And by the way, did I miss the content of this article? It is just listening some well known web sites. Where is the news?
Phone automation (Score:5, Interesting)
I would start a layer deeper... (Score:4, Interesting)
Then I would like to see all applications coming with freely configurabel toolbars, menus and mous-actions. Any of these would make use of the same functions available at the scripting-demon.
Now, add an Office on top of that and you get really really powerful.
Also I would like to see all the desktop being task based, as I would like to see the Office being task based, rather than applicaiton-based.
The system would sense the context in which you are working and adopt. Maybe by learning your habits.
The Office would be fully modular. Wide support for answering-machines, voice-modems, fax. (Hylafax could be addressed due to modularity and scripting).
Then I would love to see code being reused:
- completly stylesheet based. No own stylesheet, just extensions to CSS1, CSS2, CSS3)
- spreadsheet in "classic" mode and "Lotus Imrpov" mode
- full use of relational databases anywhere
- full use of LDAP anywhere
- no new Fax software. Use Hylafax and/or getty.
- no monolithic applications. Instead function-modules, that can 'dock' into each other
- status monitor lists recent emails along with contacts. Full integration of IM and email without forcing the user upon certain MUA.
- export all to: Web (stylesheets!), PDF. PS, Latex, MS formats etc.
- since all is modular people disliking WPCs could replace it with a special TeX editor
- visual database designer
- visual LDAP schema designer
- and many more...
I want all information accessible anywhere in such a complex application.
Virtual offices and groupware (Score:4, Interesting)
The first company I did this with was almost entirely virtual and we used primarily telephone and email. This is good and worked OK where the projects were small enough they could be designed and implemented by 1 or 2 persons (basically isolated development). The largest project (multithreading a legacy kernel) was 3 people and I probably spent 3-4 hours a day on the phone in some phases of it.
This pattern served well enough for the next 2 companies as well (one a startup and one a large corp), but in both cases a lot of travel was involved to keep everyone in their loops.
Its not as much the software used as the mindset that everyone has to be involved in what used to be 'hallway' talk. While you have to have some additional process other than hallway talk for a project, it is very valuable and cements a group together (if all you ever experience of your co-workers is spec and design email exchange its hard to develop a feel of how they think/work, and IMO empathy with your co-workers greases the skids significantly).
To finally get to the point: based on something I read on slashdot back in 99 or so when we did the next 'virtual' startup I pushed hard to use a broader range of tools. After 4 years of trying various mechanisms some have stuck and some have not, here's what is working really well for a smallish group of sr developers (5-10) and worked OK for a larger group (25ish) of mixed sr and jr people doing development of a 500kloc scale project involving kernel work (database and OS/networking):
We set up UnrealIRC as the server (with a hack to disable the throttling so people can paste blocks of code or debug output w/o getting limited to 1 line per second) inside a firewall. Everyone uses an SSH tunnel to get to it. For clients everyone uses Xchat or mIRC.
The most important trivial sounding thing about this setup is that everyone set up a trigger that watches for their name or traffic on a
We use TWiki: it keeps everything in RCS under the covers and lets you easily attach binary files to any page (for drawings and such). There are lots of fancy plugins.
Real World Example (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux OS. I probably should have switched a year earlier, but it's definitely ready for most business users now. Wars have been fought over which distro to use, but Xandros [xandros.com] can definitely help a small company be productive right now.
OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheets, and even HTML authoring (until Nvu [nvu.com] becomes available soon). OpenOffice has a good user interface, ease of use and interoperability. Like most open source products, it just keeps getting better.
Mozilla for email and web browsing. I'll switch to Firefox soon. From what I've read, Outlook refugees (poor bastards) would like Ximian Evolution. [ximian.com]
Fax via email. I chose MaxEmail [maxemail.com], but there are others. Way cheaper, better and less hassle than a fax machine. I strongly prefer email. MaxEmail allows technoweanies to send a fax and we can still handle it as email (choice of PDF or TIFF). They also provide voice mail systems, but we don't use them.
Cell Phones. This sounds a bit cheesy at first glance, but the world is moving to wireless, almost forcing employees to have a cell phone anyway. Unless you're running a call center, cell phones meet all the phone needs of a typical small business. Voice mail is included. The concept of a receptionist, or worse an automated attendant system, is outdated. Putting customers on hold and transferring them three times is not a "feature" anyone should want in a phone system. VoIP and hacking together open source voice mail systems are neat technologies, but they're overkill for typical small business. If you need a small phone system, Siemens makes the GigaSet line that is well engineered with voicemail and wireless. When I last looked, they were about $350 + $80 per handset, maximum of 8 users. New models include routers and other cool stuff.
QuickBooks. Definitely NOT open source, but hopefully someone will create an open source program that can read QB data, or at least a native Linux version of QB. For now, QB Pro 2000 runs under CrossOver, but it's ugly. QB can actually be used for a lot more than accounting. If you like, it'll manage a customer/contact database, track time for hourly employees, provide rudimentary project management, etc.
In the perfect world, there would be one system that did everything. It'd be well integrated, easy to use and open source. That world will never exist, but we can come close. The goal should still be as few systems as possible, less complexity, lowest cost, and maximum ease of use. It should scale well when new employees are added. A small geek company like mine could easily go broke trying to create the perfect system. There are times when close enough will have to do, so you can get to the paying work and the never ending stream of government forms and accounting.
Re:hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
1)meet hot chick
2)show them your low Slashdot UID
3)get laid
I'm still working on my plan.
Re:hmmm (Score:3, Funny)
4) Pay
Re:Already done (Score:2, Interesting)
The link in the original post had instructions for setting it up in Linux, with free software.
I have been using my Linux server as an answering machine for about three years now. When I get a voice message, it is archived, noted in a log file, converted to MP3, posted on a web UI, and e-mailed to my yahoo mail account. So, I can access the message locally, or via Yahoo Mail if I'm out.
Re:Already done (Score:3, Insightful)
Silly me, I actually spend about a minute looking for the source code on the author's site! The least that the parent could have done is to mention explicitely that it's not open source, so as to avoid deceiving people.