This is the story of our recent attempt at Carson Systems to move from proprietary desktop-based software to various web-based and open source solutions, how they integrated with our existing set-up and the practical realities of getting a small group of people to migrate to a new system. With the recent acquisition of JotSpot by Google (JotSpot is an app we’ve been using for a while to manage some projects), it’s interesting to see where web-based solutions are succeeding or falling short right now, and what needs to change for them to really work well for your business.
What Every Office Needs …
Let’s start with the basics. Every web company, whether you’re doing design, development or anything else, needs the following software:
- Text editor
- Code editor
- Graphics package
- Storage
- Backup
- FTP
- Chat/IM
- Calendar
- Address book
- Spreadsheets
As a company, if you don’t decide which packages your employees use in each of these categories they will go ahead and choose their own - resulting in a potentially incompatible environment.
Another problem with having everyone choose their own systems is that when something goes wrong, you have to know everyone’s unique setup and how to fix it. Any more than two people and you’ll end up spending 50 per cent of your time putting out IT fires. Not cool.
The value of having everyone use the same software and platform is that it makes your business very simple. It minimizes confusion, makes training easier, and allows people to pick up each other’s work when necessary, without having to learn a brand new system - not to mention that you’ll save cash in the process!
The Plan
I’m one of the founders of Carson Systems, a small company of five. Unfortunately, I’m also the Tech Support Bitch. (It’s funny how having a degree in Computer Science and knowing PHP will do that to you).
As soon as we hired our second full-time employee, I knew that we needed to minimize potential problems and complexity with IT. It was time to get everyone on the same system, using the same software. Here were my goals:
- Affordable: We didn’t want to spend money if we didn’t have to
- Reliable: It needed to be stable enough that we could rely on it
- Easy to use: We didn’t want to spend tons of time on training
Our Setup
The first thing we decided to do was choose the platform. As three of us were on Macs and one of us (me) was on PC, I decided to ditch my Sony VAIO and get a MacBook Pro. I don’t want to go too much into the Mac vs PC issue (for fear of starting a flame war), but here’s why we chose to use Macs:
- They’re well designed
- They ship with good email and address book software
- They don’t have crap pre-installed software to delete
- They can also run XP for testing (using Parallels)
The second task was to pick all the software we would use. Here’s the initial list we decided on:
| Type | Software | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Text editor | TextEdit | Free and pre-installed |
| Code editor | TextWrangler | Free |
| Graphics package | Fireworks | $100 |
| Storage | DropSend | $99 per month (for whole company) |
| Backup | SuperDuper | Free (basic version) |
| FTP | Cyber Duck | Free |
| Chat/IM | iChat | Free and pre-installed |
| Mac Mail | Free and pre-installed | |
| Calendar | Google Calendar | Free |
| Address book | Mac Address Book | Free and pre-installed |
| Spreadsheets | Tables | $49 |
So if you add all of that up, we’re looking at about $173.75 per person. If we had chosen, say, Office and Studio 8 (the usual choices), the cost per person would have been nearer to $1699! But, could these alternatives cut it when it came to everyday use?
The results
Some of our choices worked brilliantly. Some sucked so bad we wanted to smash our heads against our monitors. Here’s the nitty-gritty:
Text editor
TextEdit turned out to be decent. There were some issues with Word documents not being displayed properly, but overall, we were pretty happy with it.
We also tried Writely (now part of Google Docs) which was a dream to use. The collaboration feature is especially useful. However, it’s a real problem to not be able to create or edit documents when you’re not connected to the web. This turned out to be the killer with Writely.
This presents a major problem with the “Office 2.0″ web apps. Writing documents, creating spreadsheets and sending emails are mission critical tasks. Not being able to do this while you’re off-line is a major issue.
Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that online office apps are definitely the future, but until wifi becomes globally ubuiquitous, these apps just aren’t viable. (Scrybe appears to get around this, enabling you to update in the browser while you’re offline - we’ll be trying this one out for sure!)
- Ended up using: Word
- Costs: $470 per user (Office suite - bought on eBay)
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1
Code editor
TextWrangler is BBEdit’s little brother. However, it doesn’t have a WYSIWYG interface, which proved to be difficult for our non-techie employees. The switch to TextWrangler has therefore cost us some time in XHTML/CSS training, but we feel it was worth it.
We really miss Dreamweaver’s built in FTP and WYSIWYG functionality, but it’s just too damn expensive if all you need to do is simple XHTML/CSS updates (and besides which, despite various upgrades towards achieving standards compatability, it still causes a few code slips).
- Ended up using: TextWrangler
- Costs: $0 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 7
Graphics package
We decided to go with Fireworks because it’s designed for web graphics. We use legitimate old versions that we’ve bought off eBay - all the fancy new features of new versions are kind of surplus to our requirements and although old versions of Fireworks can sometimes be unstable on Intel Macs, it hasn’t been too much of a problem.
- Ended up using: Fireworks
- Costs: roughly $80 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 2
Storage
As we’ve built DropSend, we decided to “eat our own dogfood” and use it for our shared company storage. We’re using the Business Plan ($99 per month), which gives us a shared place to dump logos, important files, and so on - great for our needs.
DropSend needs a little bit of improvement, really. Once we’ve developed a DropSend Storage Drive that just mounts on your desktop, it’ll be perfect for shared company storage.
Initially, we tried sharing a .mac drive, but it turned out to be fairly slow and expensive.
- Ended up using: DropSend
- Costs: $99 per month for the Business Plan
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 2
Backup
I did a ton of research on this and SuperDuper always came out on top. It’s easy to use, dirt cheap and is completely bug free. Every Thursday, everyone hooks up their external Seagate 250GB drive and starts up SuperDuper. It copies only what has changed since the last backup, so it’s very quick.
- Ended up using: SuperDuper
- Costs: $0 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1
FTP
I had heard good things about Cyber Duck and it was free, so we gave it a try. Unfortunately it crashed all the time and lacked the functionality we needed.
We then tried Transmit and were completely blown away. One of its best features is that it allows you to simply drag a file you’ve edited onto the Transmit icon and it automatically uploads it to the correct place on your site.
The only thing that really annoys me about Transmit is that when you want to get a file, you have to make sure that it goes into the right directory on your local drive. It would be much easier if you could just click “Get” on the file you wanted and it knew where to put it on your local drive, based on the directory structure. (Let me know if you know how to do this!)
Using Dreamweaver’s built in FTP was way easier than using TextWrangler and Transmit, but Dreamweaver is just too expensive to justify the “hassle savings”.
- Ended up using: Transmit
- Costs: $29.95 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 5
Chat/IM
We decided to have everyone sign up for an AIM account and just use iChat. It’s already installed, works well, supports video chat, and is completely free. Perfecto!
- Ended up using: iChat
- Costs: $0 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1
Choosing an email program was pretty hard. Most people were really attached to Entourage or Outlook, but we were trying to move away from Office, so decided to centralize on Mail as it comes pre-installed with all Macs. It’s solid and bug free.
The hardest part (for me) was giving up Outlook’s To-Do List functionality. To replace this, we switched to recording our To-Dos in OmniOutliner, which comes free with all Macs.
Another really frustrating thing about Mail is that you can’t use multi-colored flags. Call me crazy, but I’d like to have a couple of different color flags when I flag emails. With Outlook I used to flag work emails that needed follow-up with a red flag; personal emails that needed follow-up were flagged with a green flag.
Mail can’t do this. I’ve not figured out a good solution to this and it drives me nuts.
However, the IT savings of getting everyone on Mail are huge. Using one system (instead of a mix of Entourage, Outlook and Mail) makes IT support extremely simple (even non-existent!)
- Ended up using: Mac Mail
- Costs: $0 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 7
Calendar
Finding a good shared company calendar turned out to be a frustrating experience. You can share your iCal calendars by publishing them, but those who subscribe to a calendar can’t update it. Argh.
We decided to create a Google Calendar and have everyone subscribe to it in iCal. This works well except that you cannot update it directly from iCal. You have to log into Google Calendar. Again, argh.
As you can see, neither solution is easy. However, at least Google Calendar enables everyone to make updates.
- Ended up using: Google Calendar
- Costs: $0 per user
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 5
Address Book
Finding a good shared company address book is also a nightmare. If you have an LDAP server you can apparently share a company address book that everyone can update. If you don’t have an LDAP server, you can share your Address Book with everyone, and they can update it. BUT you all have to have a .mac account!
Evil Apple! So we all signed up for .mac accounts and guess what? It doesn’t work properly. It appears that if you share your address book with more than one person, and you give them all rights to update the address book, the synchronization starts screwing up. At least that’s what happened to us.
So we still haven’t found a good solution to this. Any ideas would be appreciated!
- Ended up using: Address Book
- Costs: $65 per user (for .mac account)
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 8
Spreadsheets
Trying to avoid the expense of Excel, we thought we’d give Tables a try. It sucked so bad that we’ve decided it’s actually worth paying the extra money for Excel.
After using Excel for years and being used to its powerful features, Tables was a complete nightmare. Not to mention very buggy. It was painful. On top of these troubles, it saved files in a proprietary format that was incompatible with Excel!
The only major drawback to Excel is that it’s hard to collaborate and share documents. I know that Microsoft will be changing this (they’ll have to), but right now there’s no good way to do this. So for spreadsheets that we need to share, we use Google Spreadsheets. It’s a great solution!
- Ended up using: Excel
- Costs: Part of office suite
- Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1
Conclusion
By choosing this suite of office tools, I believe we’ve made big savings in tech support costs and time management. However, it was definitely painful in the beginning when we made the switch-over.
Ideally, I’d like to use web apps for all of our needs, but it’s just not feasible until wifi becomes ubiquitous. I believe this will happen very soon, so it’s only a matter of time. However, until then, we’ll have to live with this hotchpotch of apps.
I hope that this account of our experiment is helpful for others out there running a small business. You can definitely save costs on software and tech support by being a bit creative.
Have Your Say
I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences with choosing software for your small company. Please share!
Like this article? Digg it!
I am really surprised to not see Textmate up there. I realize it would have added cost, but I think you would be hard pressed to convince anyone that uses it, that it isn’t worth it.
I completely agree with Fireworks. I watch these hardcore designers dance around with Photoshop/Illustrator/ImageReady, and not really do anything that couldn’t be done in Fireworks.
Drop send is great, but expensive. You are paying for interface and ease of use. MediaTemple gives me 100GB for $20. It has FTP/SSH/HTTP. Is it as easy as DropSend? No, but for the $79 extra you easily found money for Textmate. Plus you already mentioned that everyone has an FTP client. :)
Didn’t you try NeoOffice 2?
For calendar sharing, you really should like Leopard’s new iCal and put Horde 4.2 (in development) on your server for full team calendar management thanks to the CalDav system that both will support.
You should register SuperDuper!, as it’s a great indie app and registering allows your backups to be scheduled. Backup isn’t worth anything if they’re never being done. :)
I personally wouldn’t skimp on back up.
For spreadsheets and other Microsoft-Office-like tasks, you should seriously consider OpenOffice.org. The recent releases are very good. The are still a few hiccoughs in moving documents between it and Microsoft Office (especially between Impress and PowerPoint), but you won’t be doing that. And the price is right :-)
Nice round up. We use similar tools at Blue Flavor. The exceptions?
Storage: We have a shared server w/ storage. As of right now we don’t have any online storage.
For code we use TextMate which is inexpensive and great.
For graphics we’ve all got Photoshop. I’ve heard great things about Fireworks, but I’ve not used it in years and imagine that the learning curve might be too much to switch now. Not that I think it’s hard to learn, just that I know Photoshop really well.
For our shared calendar we use iCal. We just created an email address that belongs to Cyndi (our office manager) and whenever we want an event to show up on the shared calendar we just invite that address and it shows up in the shared calendar. We just started doing that and so far it’s working pretty good.
A few you didn’t mention that we use daily:
* Basecamp for collaboration and PM. Not perfect but better than anything else I’ve tried.
* Harvest for timetracking. Working really, really well so far.
* Pages. Many of our templates are in pages and it works pretty nicely as a Word substitute. We do also use Word.
* Keynote. For storyboarding and presentations.
* OmniGraffle. For lots of stuff.
OpenOffice.org gives you word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and a database for free. It’s based on X11 now, but they’re releasing an Aqua version soon.
Mozilla Thunderbird is a free replacement for Mail that gives you the ability to color messages (just hit 1-5 on your keyboard while a message is selected).
You should get Mail Act On:
http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html
and use that to color your messages on the fly!
Considering your stated aim was to use open source software, I’m very surprised you didn’t consider NeoOffice.org or OpenOffice.org; I use NOo on my Mac at work and OOo on Ubuntu at home, and both are great.
I also use Gimp and Inkscape for graphics, but as I’m not a power user I don’t know how they compare with Adobe and Macromedia products; for my day-to-day stuff, however, they’re perfect.
You actually pay to use your own software? ;)
Their are a number of pretty good solutions to common small business IT problems in the book Open Source Small Business Solutions. Worth a read.
I have to admit to having countless problems with earlier versions of Cyberduck, but it’s been particularly stable for me for months. Another shout for TextMate as well. And SubEthaEdit makes for a useful tool to have lying round for collaborative coding in small teams.
Another vote for TextMate. I honestly cannot believe people use other editors, and feel good about where my money has gone.
YummyFtp is another app I love(and paid for)
Omnigraffle for architecture diagramming and Conversation for IRC.
If you can, take Office off the list for some of your machines. I can’t imagine anyone using it for anything other than a book report ;) But seriously, I realize some people need it but many won’t need to author in it. When a .doc winds up in your inbox you can just read it in googleOffice/writely. Then you have more money for all the nice little apps you can get for OS X.
Re: Transmit and where “gotten” files go:
Simply control-click your chosen server’s listing in your Favourites and choose Edit. In the sheet that comes down, click “Set” next to the “Local path” field. Choose the local equivalent of your initial server path for that favourite, and you’re good to go.
As a bonus, you can then check the DockSend box, which allows you to drag any file that lives under that “local path” directory, and it will automatically upload to its rightful place on the server.
This is one of Transmit’s best features!
You stated “It would be much easier if you could just click “Get” on the file you wanted and it knew where to put it on your local drive, based on the directory structure. (Let me know if you know how to do this!)”
There is a way, it’s just hidden. Make sure your saved ftp bookmark has Local Path filled in. Once that’s done, simply connect to the ftp site. Important…before you do anything else choose Link Folder Navigation from the Go menu. Tadah!!!
What about Skype? It is very useful when you need to call land lines or mobile phones from your computer. Or jajah.com which is web-based.
Full iCal and Google Calendar synchronization is coming.
Check out the demo at:
http://blog.spanningsync.com/2006/10/a_quick_video_d.html
Why are you paying for the full version of MS Office. Get the Teacher Student Edition! Or, use StarOffice or OpenOffice which are a fraction of the price and pretty good. Another tip - if you are using Windows on your newer macs - download the new beta version of MS Office (costs about a $1 or something like that. Is a stunner.
Take a look at Quickbase for online collaboration. Is fantastic as tools go.
There is no easy solution on the address book issue and syncing doesn’t work across groups. Suggest you move to Outlook and Exchange… Sigh! You might also look at Thunderbird.
Other way I’ve worked around this is to sync everything to a single CardScan or Yahoo account. Hard though to manage privacy etc.
I’ll add that, for me, TextMate and Transmit have been worthwhile investments for personal and freelance projects.
I’m surprised no 37signals products came up in combination with desktop software (iCal) or Dashboard widgets. I’m thinking of the flexibility of Backpack here.
While I’ve adopted iWork — Pages — on my mac at home, I find it very, very hard to not have a computer running Excel handy, mac or PC.
I’ve used the free version of DropSend (thanks!) and need to try out SuperDuper.
And finally, Adium is a great alternative to iChat. Video conferencing in iChat is a nice plus, but Adium’s features win when it comes to IM for me.
Any use of Skype or anything on your computers?
Plaxo is great for address book synchronization. They have a plugin for Thunderbird which will automatically sync your address book.
I’m surprised that no mention has been made of the excellent Zoho tools: http://zoho.com
Fantastic and free! I use Planner a lot for staying on top of my projects for it’s really easy collaborative to-do lists and notes.
As for spreadsheets and word processing, OpenOffice.org is a fast, free, and almost drop-in compatible replacement for Excel and Word.
Keeping things synced is still pretty far from ideal though, that is true.
[…] Then I came across Ryan Carson’s post “Our office 2.0 Experiment” which explains “the story of their recent attempt at Carson Systems to move from proprietary desktop-based software to various web-based and open source solutions.” “By choosing this suite of office tools, I believe we’ve made big savings in tech support costs and time management. However, it was definitely painful in the beginning when we made the switch-over. Ideally, I’d like to use web apps for all of our needs, but it’s just not feasible until wifi becomes ubiquitous. I believe this will happen very soon, so it’s only a matter of time. However, until then, we’ll have to live with this hotchpotch of apps.” […]
Did you notice textwrangler’s build in FTP options? Open from FTP and Save to FTP (with bookmarks too) is what made the programme such a winner for me. It’s saved me hundreds of cyberduck crashes (and sadly I don’t have the petty change for transmit).
We use Cyberduck and have done so for some time with almost no problems and it’s free (donation ware). Combined with Smultron (another great free editor with a great icon!) works fantasic for editing. Even though we are a pro shop with full adobe and macromedia suite - I often resort to Smultron for its simplicity and speed. Personally find textmate annoying.
Use Basecamp for all our projects. Adium or Skype for IM. iChat too hard to talk to other networks. When are they gonna relaise that network compatibility is the killer feature - and how many of my contact have .mac? next to none!
Salesforce for CRM though expensive - I’ve yet to find a suitable replacement — hanging out for the rumored/promised “Sunrise” CRM app from 37 signals!.
I’m also suprised no mention was made of a financial/accounting solution - one of my biggest bugbears. We use MYOB - but I’d love to see a decent web based app. Looked at Netsuite (too expensive) and most other online accounting products are not available here in NZ. So I’d love to know what others are using.
Have a .mac account - but not seeing a lot of value there. Too expensive for what it delievers - who needs electronic greeting cards? (sheesh). Just hope Apple doesn’t something brilliant with their iPhone/.mac/ichat/ etc
CRM & Accounting are I think the 2 things that are seriously underserved in the web space. Where are all the innovators Ryan?
Otherwise a great story.
I’m surprised you never gave Google spreadsheets a try. It’s built into the gmail account and can be shared across account.
Why did you not go with Open Office and Mozilla as a matter of interest? I’ve found them both very easy to use for a small (5 person) system.
Digger, for CRM we use Sugar CRM (Open Source Edition). It is an excellent system, with an active community. Working on integrating it with our accounting system, but yes, there is a shortage of good online ERP/Accounting systems.
Has anybody had any luck with Joyent, the online office?
YummyFTP is superb.
It’s got 3 exquisite features I could not live without:
- per-site prefs so the local folder is where you keep all files for a certain site
- filtering
- Dual Browse: browse local and remote file lists in Sync!
As an alternative to Google Spreadsheets, you may want to try EditGrid (http://www.editgrid.com/). It hast all the features from Google Spreadsheets plus much more. I’m not affiliated with EditGrid but use it everyday - and it’s a dream to use.
I use OpenOffice for word processing, presentations etc.; Eclipse for coding; Gedit for text files; Dreamhost account for online backup (rsync over SSH to 200Gb storage space for about £2.30 per month); rsync to local hard drives for local backup; Nautilus for FTP (if I am feeling crazy), but generally use SSH/SCP; Gimp for graphics (but I’m not a graphic designer); GAIM for IM; Zimbra for email client, address book and calendaring; Thunderbird for secondary email accounts; Linux OS. I only pay for my online storage :).
Give a try to MailActOn and MailTags, by www.indev.ca. They’ll really increase Apple Mail producitivity and flexibility. You can add projects, tags, iCal todos, due dates, notes to your mail; also, you can create Mail.app’s smart folders based on them.
Other softwares I can’t stand without are DEVONthink, for getting together informations from various sources, and Cmap Tools (opensource), for creating conceptual maps, that - for me - is the best way to have a complete view of an issue.
These days, I’m evaluating Crm4Mac, a contact management system that intagrates Mail, iCal and Address Book, as well as Midnight Inbox and Easytask for getting things done.
Concerning code editor we just switched over to Aptana and it works great for us. I highly recommend it.
And Filezilla is a pretty decent, easy and free FTP solution.
Have to say love the transperancy of the article, great stuff!
Wow, thanks for all the great tips! Sounds like we should give TextMate a try.
[…] Okay, I get it. Macs are awesome. After reading Ryan Carson’s Our Office 2.0 Experiment over on Vitamin, and the long list of comments from other Mac users, I decided to play the John Hodgman role and spin it Windows style (although a lot of my suggestions are open source and also available on OSX). […]
TextMate is just amazing - saves me a TON of time coding. I ditched Dreamweaver and BBEdit after using TextMate.
I’m also surprised you guys didn’t try NeoOffice. I have both Office X and NeoOffice on my Mac and actually like NeoOffice better.
I agree about online apps… the main problem right now is that everyone is offline at some point or another. If all your apps are online, your computer is pretty much just a DVD player if you can’t connect to the Internet. I’d rather spend some money and have some good apps on my computer so I can code, write proposals, edit spreadsheets, etc.
The online apps are good for collaboration, but they still have a long way to go.
[…] Quite an interesting article on Vitamin about the ‘Office 2.0′ concept. In a nutshell, that free or subscription based online services may be the next generation of productivity software. I found IT|Redux the other day, which is a pretty thought provoking site on the subject. […]
For your email solution, have you considered Scalix?
Their community version would fit your organization, cut back on your expenses, should run on a relatively inexpensive server, and give you most of the Exchange features that organizations tend to use.
I really think that more companies would use this if it was better publicized *coff*coff*looks at boss*coff*coff*.
I also recommend OpenOffice.org - we use it in my office and I’ve actually come to prefer it over Microsoft Office because I can save in just about any format I want, including Microsoft Office formats. OO2 has spreadsheets, powerpoint stuff, and a whole bunch of goodies - for free!
Did you completely overlook OpenOffice?
Oh, and Zimbra collaboration server is super-hot for email/calender integration.
No, we considered it, but I didn’t think it would be very reliable. It looks like that wasn’t a valid assumption (based on all of the comments). Might be time to give it a try!
I’ve used skEdit for a while and it’s been great for me on freelance and personal projects. Not as robust as what I’ve heard about TextMate, but pretty solid nonetheless.
This is quite an interesting experiment. For me though, I think it shows why often spending money is the better way to do business.
A text editor and FTP client are no substitute for Dreamweaver. Saving a few hundred quid upfront is great, but do you count the lost productivity of not using an integrated tool? If dreamweaver only made someone 0.01% more productive, then it will have paid for itself.
Agree with OpenOffice recommendations.
Our brilliant IT department forced a bloated collaboration suite/trainwreck, which adversely affected Word/Excel/Powerpoint.
Installed OpenOffice in protest, and love it.
[…] Back to the web, we were interested to hear news of the acquistion of Jotspot by Google as we currently use Jotspot for lots of our work. Having switched to the wiki some time ago, it has to be said that our experience of the wiki is really positive, it’s proved to be flexible and simple to use. It has been invaluable in preparing for the next Future of Web Apps summit, as it’s enabled us to share and edit information from a central source, without remembering where each document is stored and what it’s called etc. There is an article on Vitamin which covers the topic in more depth that you could check out… […]
Regarding Cyberduck and crashes: a recent version of Cyberduck (I think it was 2.6) was very prone to crashes; however, the newest version (2.6.2) seems to have sorted all those problems out and you might want to look at it again.
I can highly recommend skEdit for code editing requirements, it has a built-in FTP client for dreamweaver like usage, and has good preview abilities allowing you to setup various browsers. For me it’s ‘dreamweaver’ lite which is perfect! Definitly worth checking out!
RE: Get the Teacher Student Edition! [of MS Office]
That isn’t a valid license in a commercial setting. Using the student/teacher version would be the same as using a completely pirated version in a business. The software is the same, but the licensing is not.
Hey Carson,
Thanks for sharing some insights on some of the cogs and gears of your organization and some outline of the decision making processes. I would also recommend looking at eclipse with sftp support as it is great for supporting php, of course java, and growing in RoR support. It also ties nicely into subversion and sftp for one click save/publish. I still use notepad ++ (like textwrangler’s evil nemesis) for simple css/xhtml changes, but once the app starts growing the full fledge IDE comes in handy.. and the cost of ($0) is nice.
As for publishing/spreadsheet/presentation, etc I am still hooked on office apps, though calendar and mail are now a GOOG affair.
Peace out.
Gregg
[…] Some small companies such as Carson Systems have experimented with try to ditch Microsoft Office and adopt either free tools such as Google Spreadsheet, free text editors such as TextPad on the Mac, the straightforward email capbilities of Apple’s Mail.app and calendaring from Google. Their experiment tells an interesting story whereby they tried to adopt such products, even dabbling with Google Docs for a while, but some key features let them down. Most notably the lack of ability to work offline or unconnected to the Web with this latest batch of browser delivered applications. In lieu of these features Carson Systems reverted back to using some of the Microsoft Office suite. […]
I cannot recommend introducing SubVersion into your development environment enough. It has saved my ass on more than one occasion by letting me revert to an older version of a file. If you combine that with a backup process on your subversion server, you will have an excellent redundant backup strategy.
Amen to that! We use Subversion on all of our web apps. However, we’re not currently using it for Vitamin and Carson Workshops. We’re going to change that soon.
I’ll second TextMate. I used BBEdit and then Text Wrangler for years. TextMate is so nice.
MailTags should help you.
Also, I saw no one mention Now Contact and Up to Date. Those have been around for years and are still being developed. Contact allows you to share address books.
I use Apple’s Backup to do a weekly incremental. We also have retrospect running on our server.
OpenOffice to me is clunky. It works, and I’ve used it.
I’m not so sure I could drop Photoshop for Fireworks. I use so many Photoshop features to design sites, not just slice and ready web assets.
Transmit I’ve used for a long time. It’s fabulous.
Otherwise, I use many of the same applications and have had the same experience or came to the same conclusions.
think maybe you are looking at the wrong packages, except possibly the mac shipped software like address book and ical and of course the excellent transmit and fireworks
I think if you are looking for a free cheap alternative then Linux is already there, either try ubuntu and install relevant software that is missing e.g. nice graphical ftp software. Also I have been trying pure:dyne for many http://puredyne.goto10.org/ of the software you are after, if looking for openoffice then try using the openoffice modules from dyne site.
I mean common openoffice 2 is so much better than it used to be when running on linux.
Highly agree that office web apps wont take off until wifi is more abundent..
Really nice article though and very useful for small companies
Have you tried Fugu for your FTP needs? I like it much better than CyberDuck.
I know that it is pretty expensive, but Zend Studio is a all-out great PHP development platform. I’m here assuming you’re using PHP, so correct me if I’m wrong (or have some fun, don’t correct me and let me live in a bliss of unknowing..)
Zend allows you all sorts of PHP-intel (profiling of your scripts to catch that bottleneck, etc) and offers a ton of help in navigating in your own src (Ctrl-clicking on any class, function or constant jumps to the file/line where it is defined) code-completion of your own classes with hits taken from your phpdoc etc. It also offers a step-by-step php-debugger which I havent played with that much.. yet..
After first trying Zend I wouldnt look back, you really produce more when using it.
Also, I second on the whole OpenOffice thing.. The mac version is pretty lacking, so go with NeoOffice which, iirc, has just released a port of OOo 2.0
[…] I read a feature today on the Vitamin website (a great source for info about new and exciting web developments) about transitioning small teams from a “traditional, expensive desktop software to a connected, cheap and collaborative work environment”. We here at Toggl can relate to the trials and tribulations of Carson Systems, but we are also benefiting greatly (both in efficiency and economically) from the changes we’ve made. Our choices for web apps differ a bit from the feature, though we do use Google calendar and find it pretty sufficient. For IMing we use Skype chat (come on, we ARE in Estonia) and it’s great. Obviously we don’t mess with the spreadsheets (Ryan Carson doesn’t have good things to say about Tables!) Toggl is perfect for us to track time and create reports…thankfully”spreadsheet” is not a word in our vocabulary! […]
1) Excel files are as proprietary a format as whatever Tables uses. However, most of the world uses Excel, and therefore you have ended up buying it as well.
2) For flagging emails in Mail, have you tried using the Colours panel? Open it with Format/Colours from the menu, then select a message in a list view and double click on the colour. Move the selection away from that message to see the result.
what about open office, it does everything office does only free!
To add colour-coded flags to your messages in Mail, simply install MailActOn, which is a donationware plugin made by these guys:
http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html
They make another plugin, too, that lets you add tags to your messages individually.
Great article Ryan.
Mark: The problem with Plaxo is that (as far as I am aware, Plaxo is MS based) and I think Carson Systems works on Macs. Correct me if I am wrong.
In terms of the comments about using Linux (Ubuntu) as an alternative to OSX, I would need to stipulate that although linux is a GPLed OS and is free, It still isnt very user friendly. I myself use linux as a desktop and make my money through supporting clients running on linux.
It would however solve ALOT of the problems faced with using MS or Mac. If you went for a kde based linux distro, you would have ftp, ldap, imap, sftp,… built right into your browser (konqueror).
Gimp unfortunately doesnt seem to be to popular with designers. I only know of one designer that is as productive in Gimp as in Photoshop, and thats because I forced him to use it for a few months, (He is now using Photoshop again).
The solution (for those asking) to the Address Book problem seems to be installing an openldap server. This can be directly integrated into OSX’s addressbook and mail. As of Address Book 4, I think you can add contacts to the ldap server. If not, there is an application called “Addressbook X LDAP” made by j2anywhere that takes care of the uploading. Using LDAP will also give you the added benefit of being able to integrate your contacts into some sort of web application (many articles how to do this in php) and access it from most other applications made by Mozilla and MS.
I do however agree that OpenOffice is the right way to go. It might not be apparent at the moment, but with the decision to make Microsoft support the Open Document format, within the next release of MS Office, Open Office will have full support for documents generated by MS Office. It would simply become a matter of if you prefer MS Offices iterface or Open Offices.
As for Skype, dont get me started. If you want to go for a voip based solution, dont use something that is proprietary. You then get led into the same issues you have with MS Office.
The best solution here would be to install an asterisk PBX server. This would give you integration between standard pstn pots phones and any proper sip based phone. To put this into perspective, you could have your staff use most new mobiles (nokia N90 for example) as a roaming extension. When they walk into the office (or anywhere they have wireless access), their mobile phone turns into a standard phone and makes calls through the office phone line, and gets given their extension. It also means that, in the situation of Ryan, when he is in America, and in range of a wireless network, his secretary can just forward the call to his normal extension, and Ryan would just pick it up (over the internet, so no paying for the call). Carson Systems employees could stay in contact all over the world for free. The only problem with this solution is that BT doesnt abide by the Euro ISDN specifications properly, so setting up a system using the isdn2e provided by BT is a non trivial issue.
And just a side note about voip, if you want to use it reliably, use something like Gizmo. Its sip based and doesnt have ‘nat’ issues like most of the others out there or sound hogging issues like Skype.
[…] Vitamin Features » Our Office 2.0 Experiment (tags: office software productivity web2.0 tools web article) […]
[…] Vitamin Features » Our Office 2.0 Experiment (tags: office software web2.0 productivity tools web business opensource free startup online apps resources reference) […]
Gimp unfortunately doesnt seem to be to popular with designers. I only know of one designer that is as productive in Gimp as in Photoshop, and thats because I forced him to use it for a few months, (He is now using Photoshop again).
I feel sorry for your designer. ‘Productive’ in GIMP probably meant that he’d export the layers into Photoshop when you weren’t looking.
It is my experience that people who evangelize GIMP do not understand what makes Photoshop so good. It’s not even a Mac vs. Windows sort of issue. The Photoshop UI is seamless. Anything you want? Boom, right there, you don’t have to play with it. GIMP doesn’t even have anything remotely resembling an intuitive UI from a graphics standpoint.
Photoshop is also built like a rock. It doesn’t matter which machine I’m using, be it a low-end Inspiron, an old AMD workstation with a badly color corrected 15″ CRT, or a brand spanking new G5 with one of the fancy Apple Cinema Displays… Photoshop scales them all and does it well. GIMP does none of these things.
On top of that, every time I tried to seriously use GIMP in a mission critical application… it crashed like a toy airplane. If you’re a graphics professional, you don’t have time for that. Why waste 15 minutes waiting for an amature graphics application to do something that it only takes a second in Photoshop? It doesn’t matter when it comes down to cost. Even if GIMP wasn’t ‘free’ Photoshop would do it faster and better. Hell, even if Photoshop *was* free people would still choose it over anything else. It really is that good.
So don’t go spreading the FUD to non-designers that GIMP is somehow a magical Photoshop replacer. That’s like saying MSPaint is capable of replacing Fireworks.
[…] In the article called Our Office 2.0 Experiment Ryan Carson from Carson Systems describes how his team managed the transition from traditional, expensive software to a connected, cheap and collaborative work environment applying the use of free open-source alternatives. […]
Couple of things.
#1. NeoOffice always seemed painfully bloated and slow to me…even moreso then Microsoft Office running through Rosetta. I uninstalled it within 10 minutes of installing it.
#2. I think you missed a huge feature in TextMate that deserves mention. It isn’t as good as a built in FTP browser within the editor, but any file you would like to edit, you just hit apple+J and it will open it in the editor that you have chosen for the file type, and automatically reupload it upon saving the file. It is the best way to edit off an ftp on the Mac until TextMate has a built in remote file browser.
A lot of people are stating TextMate is great, but don’t state why. Mainly…macros.
This is a great post and very helpful. We’ve been working to standardize our software too. One of the things we’ve been evaluating is Ubuntu Linux and its OpenOffice suite. Everything has been working well with it, the only limitations are some pieces of software that are Windows only that we can’t run. Thanks for all your insight. We are moving to Google Calendar based on your recommendation.
Cheers, Chris
“Why TextMate is great” = it’s a lot like Emacs, but with scripting languages that aren’t Lisp as the way it does everything, with great defaults out of the box, and a nice GUI. It’s friendly for casual users, and it’s remarkably powerful when you get under the hood and start scripting your own snippets, commands, functionality, etcetera. A lot of people see the built-in macros and never go beyond, which is a shame because it’s really designed to be extended.
Anyway, one thing I would mention is that whilst TextMate is great, skEdit is a VERY capable editor HTML, CSS and PHP. For quite a while I used it for HTML/CSS, and then used TextMate for templating that. If you’re a PHP shop, do look at skEdit, because it’s got lovely PHP hinting, smart CSS integration, and a built-in SFTP client.
Another thumbs-up for Transmit - I shelled out just recently, and I should have moved from my battered copy of Fetch long, long ago; I think my favourite feature is that it labels the panes “Your Stuff” and “Their Stuff”, which never gets confusing in dialogue boxes no matter how similar the tree structures. It also integrates nicely with TextMate…
Have you tried out the free OpenOffice?
Here is another vote in for OpenOffice. I love it!!
Could I ask a question back? I am looking for a good “project-app” kind of thing. I would like to have an online app where our clients can log-in from the web and where we can keep all things needed for the project: Discussions, documents, dates etc. A single place where all things related to a project are stored. I find that sometimes things get lost when “only” using email…
Has anyone a good hint on that one?
Has anyone a good hint on that one?
http://www.basecamphq.com
We have been using Daylite (http://www.marketcircle.com/daylite/) for CRM, Shared Calendar, to-do items, and address book. Overall we like it, though there are some quirks — it took a bit to set up the shared database, which resides on one of my co-workers machine. We’re really just starting to use all of its features and it is simple to use and seems to be relatively flexible. I would definately check it out.
Not having read thru all the comments, this one might allready have been mentioned -
on the issue of syncing iCal and Google Calender, I came across this a little while ago. Haven’t tested it myself, but all the kids over at TUAW seems to like Spanning Sync .
Good list guys…At Start Us Up we us Stikipad, Unfuddle, Box.net and All things Google. And if we need to take things offline, OpenOffice.org rocks. For communication we use Skype quite a bit along with Google Chat (probably would use google more if you could have more than a two way chat). It’s amazing how many great free and fairly priced products there are out there to help run your business.
Another vote for NeoOffice. It’s a build of OpenOffice that uses Java to drive the GUI. Very easy to use, almost 1:1 parity with MS Office. Uses all your OSX installed fonts out of the box.
I started using it two years ago. For a long time I also had MS Office installed, but finally ditched it when I realized I hadn’t launched it in months.
A prior user noted compatibililty issues with PowerPoint presentations. This is true, but for those I use KeyNote which comes installed with new Macs and imports/exports .ppt files with ease.
Interested in the Backup aspect, i’ve got an external 250GB hard drive attached to my PC but don’t know what software to use for Backup - there just seems to be so much choice! Wish I was using a Mac again, life would be so much easier…
OpenOffice is much better these days, and is obviously good value for money as it’s free!
[…] Vitamin: Our Office 2.0 Experiment Carson Systems on what tools they use and why. […]
http://www.activecollab.com/
Basecamp like freeware…
FIREWORKS!
Thunderbird
Cyberduck
excel
powerpoint
word
(Because of Clients)
7. Chat/IM
You are kidding right? IM’ers are the most anti-productive bits of software in existence. I’m almost speechless in fact that anyone would consider them helpful outside being drunk and not at work … I only get things done when I refuse to use IRC / gtalk / and their ilk. Getting work done usually involves concentrating on something, not getting distracted by something when you’re right in the middle of getting actual work done. Unless possibly your business is stealing other peoples ideas right when they happen
Mediums of conversation / discussion should not be intrusive by default. Intrusion = non productive.
[…] There has been a raft of interesting articles and posts lately looking at alternatives to traditional desktop-based software. Some, like the people at Vitamin, are looking to reduce the cost by moving to a primarily open source solution. Others, like Sam at TechCrunch UK, are exploring the web OS approach, taking advantage of the plethora of new web-based apps that are springing up (and generally being bought by Google). And yet others are cautioning that there is a need for both desktop and web-based software. […]
You should investigate the Microsoft action pack subscription- £200 per year gets you all of MS non development tools and licences to use them to run your business on- Exchange 2003, ISA Server, Office Word/Excel/Outlook etc- 10 Licences), Windows Server 2003, Win XP (10 licences) and loads more- its only available to developers/development shops and yes I know you are Mac based but its really outstanding value. You also get updates to all service packs, betas and new releases as they go RTM- 4 times a year.
The licensing works like a rental- stop the subscription and the licences expire but its amazing value for your business. You would have to register as a microsoft partner but if you can overcome that mental hurdle you can get a lot of software for peanuts.
Ben
We’ve mostly migrated online. We’re increasingly using Google Writely & Spreadsheets. We’ve ditched Outlook entirely for Gmail (for your Domain) and Google Calendar.
Rather than having Wi-Fi everywhere, I’d be really happy just to have a Google Suite of sorts that automatically syncs with everything that’s online. (Currently I can only sync with the calendar and it’s only one way!)
Skyler:
Clearly, a lot of time has passed since you checking out GIMP. It is a monster now, a very stable, friendly and effective app. Trust me, I grew up with PS.
Oh, and I vote for OpenOffice.org, too!
Hey, also try ThinkFree Office. I use it exclusively (absolutely no MS Office bloatware). It also has online doc+spreadsheets ala Google and you can even use it on an iPod! Fab!
As an alternative you could also try Apple’s iWork. Keynote is great and Pages, although needs some work, is pretty useable.
Good luck!
[…] Ryan Carson from carson systems gave his list of office apps over at vitamin in his article Office 2.0. […]
A cool article. however, i guess not all the opensource web apps has been considered. nice comments from other users too. its helpful!
[…] Vitamin’s Article: Our Office 2.0 Experiement was rather interesting reading. […]
I’ve been tidying my licencing costs and thought I would give you my list:
Outlook -> Googlemail (Portable, browsable)
Office - > Open Office
Access - > I do Access Development so I need this and a copy of office for testing :( but other than that I can live without it
Dreamweaver - > nVu & syncBack lite
FTP -> Filezilla, there is no other
[…] Original post by contact@thinkvitamin.com (Carson Systems Ltd) and software by Elliott Back […]
[…] I have a long list of things to do and what to buy. First, prioritize. With the tight budget that I had and no manpower on my disposal, I have to play with what I have. Then I remember about an article in ThinkVitamin, where Ryan Carson explore the reality of Office 2.0 […]
Blogger, have you checked out MoneyWorks from Cognito software (www.cognito.co.nz)? It’s a New Zealand based accounting package that (while obviously still built for accountants) is great.
[…] Mr. Ryan Carson posted his Office 2.0 experiment and it’s similar to what I’ll be talking about, but I’ll be focusing more about an “on-the-road” perspective as opposed to being in the office. Gina Trapani at LifeHacker.com, also touched on how to create a “placeless office” as well. I wanted this article to dig a little deeper. With the turn of the century, the millennium has given us the digital age and the ability to access anything, anywhere, at any time. If you’re a salesman or a traveling entrepreneur (hey, they’re out there!), this series is geared towards a beginning entrepreneur and gives you an idea on how to select the right hardware, software, and Internet services to properly setup your business on the information superhighway without becoming roadkill. […]