The Mercian Labels Group Blog – Security Labels International, Mercian Labels and AC Labels

I haven’t blogged for a few weeks on the progress of our migration project. 

The main change for us in migrating to a new open source system is that our CRM is moving from MS Access to a totally new web ased system.

This involves an awful lot of work to write a new system from scratch that meets our needs as a specialist label printer.  Rich has found this to take longer than we expected, and progress has been slow but sure.  We have now got the main MVC framework up and running, with an autoupdate AJAX system that we like and need.  Currently we are formatting lots of internal web reporting pages, so there is very little to report thats interesting really.

This is likely to take another 4 weeks before its complete.  At that stage we will have a lot more to report, as we do some seriouls user testing, and configure test setups with Zimbra for email/calendaring , and Trixbox for our phone system.

I hope that the update is useful.

Some time ago I had the pleasure of doing a PHP course at openadvantage.org run by Jono Bacon.  I remember a conversation at the time about LUGradio, which at the time I put down to his passion for heavy metal music, which isnt my taste. 

I have only just worked out that LUG means Linux User Group, and that LUGradio is a podcast on linux.  So I downloaded the latest MP3 podcast (my first ever podcast in fact) and listened in.

Its very interesting content if you are learning about the world of linux and the various technical debates associated with the open source world.  You are best listening to this outside of work, as some of the content and language is not very PC at times, but these guys are very knowledgable and the debates interesting.

Its got me hooked, and I am now working my way through the back catalogue. Recommended.

I posted some weeks ago about our main microsoft server at work falling over becuase it was raining, or some other meaningless reason.  Well, yesterday, it happened again, but was sunny.

OK, its nothing to do with the weather, but the serious point is that in my experience the timing of failures on our microsoft server is either random, or is significantly delayed from the start of the cause identified.  For instance, yesterdays failure, which required me to go into the office and  fix it on a saturday, turned out to be related to friday nights daily backups.  Why the web hosting failed on saturday lunchtime is a mystery to me, but its annoying that it failed in the firstplace, that it failed due to an unrealed software package second, and the timing was random thirdly.

I sincerely hope that our ubuntu server turns out to be more reliable and understandable!

Last night I  reformatted my my PC and installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn beta on it, the first client PC we have moved completely to open source.

I had tried the ISO version as a demo which was slow, but seemed to work ok.  As it is a spare PC at home, it didnt matter if it didn’t work, as the exercise was really just an experimental  confidence booster.

Cutting straight to it, it worked. Fine, easy, no problems, no crashes, worked first time around.  As its primarily a “social” PC, its mainly used for web surfing (95%) and some skype and saving family photos. Skype went on fine, sound card worked ok, USB2 external HDD, everything.

The only unresoved issue is streaming real player for watching the BBC newscasts, but I gave up after 10 minutes – I’ll get back to it later.

Fundamentally, this has given me a lot of confidence in the ease of installing ubuntu and its stability on thick client PCs.

My first working day of using Write and Calc rather than Word and Excel has gone fine, no problems.

I like this open source stuff – full steam ahead!

Ever since the early days of this project, I had seen the openoffice.org suite, and decided that it was good enough for us in almost every way.  In fact, I took this decision on the basis of 1 presentation from the guys at openadvantage.org and a couple of minutes surfing of reviews.

 Today, I dediced to download the latest version, and set the defaults on my PC to run all my word processing, spreadsheet and presentation requirements from now on using open office.  My motivation in doing this was to trial the installation myself, and get a couple of months hands on experience with using the suite before the other 20 staff at Mercian Labels are asked to run it – lead from the front and all that!

First of all, I checked out the alternatives using this review at wikipedia, prompted because I saw a BBC video clip on the Bristol city Council IT dept moving the entire organisation to open source, saving over £1M GBP in fees.  However, they were using start office, and to be honest, I couldn’t see any reason for an SME not needing serious suport to commit to anything other than the openoffice.org suite.  There were issues over java licensing for some of the higher level functions, but with the sun announcment for making java open source at some stage, I dont see it as a threat to small users.  If something goes wrong, then we can change very quickly.

 So, I downloaded the latest release today, openoffice 2.2 from here and installed it on my laptop running XP pro.  I committed to opening and using all existing docs in openoffice rather than microsoft software to show good intent!

First impressions are:

• its good, very good
• its better than MS word for everything we do in an SME
• it runs quicker than MS  WORD and EXCEL
• the WRITE user interface is so similar to MS WORD that you dont need much, if any retraining
• It includes a very fast “save as PDF ” function which is excellent
• existing word documents open perfectly well in oo.o and save fine too
• importing custom dictionaries is a bit of a pain, but under 5 mins to learn, and under a minute to repeat when you know how.
• I cannt see any features missing that I would regularly use, with 1 major exception.  I havent tried the BASE program yet, but I know that it dosnt support VBA scripts well, if at all.  As this is our major software at present, this is a seriouls problem, and why we are writing our entire CRM in PHP on a web platform.

Overall, I like it.  I wrote my PhD thesis in WORD in 2000, and I would have doubts about trying to make a massive document with complex formatting and breaks in oo.o, but I#m probably just being paranoid.

OO.o looks excellent, and a credit to the developers over many years.  I will comment any bugs I find in the coming weeks here on this blog.

although the techies love it,probably for good reason, a lotof user interface with linux is at the command line, not the usual GUI interface that we are geneticly engineered to know and understand…. this means that if you really want to use some of the linux features and functions, you have to know how to use the command line.

I have some basic unix experience from numerical modelling research, but not enough that I didn’t have to start at square one.

I tried this website, which I was impressed with, and guided me through the basic functions well.

www.linux.org/lessons

Its worth a go , after 30 minutes I could even find and load our website files and edit them with the VI text editor.

I still prefer the GUI ubuntu interface though!