Jeremy Zawodny waxes poetic on why the world does not need another Groupware “solution” (to what?) as Novell releases their NetMail product as Open Source and suggests some problems that could use another solution or two. JWZ shares a little insight into what killed Netscape.
WARNING: May not be suitable for some environments. Not suitable for those who think the F-word should never be used.
Friday was spent at the client’s delivering the final beta of the first phase of a five-phase LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL=PHP) project. Client was ecstatic! But, of course, I came home with a list of small adjustments to punch through. Hope to tell more as it unfolds. Briefly, it’s a simple data entry and reporting system: 20 tables, 40 web pages, used by an inhouse staff to manage their workflow. This first piece got rid of the worst of their manual labors. Later phases will produce documents to present in a customer-facing web site, and tighten up the workflow tracking. Phase I was 40 hours of analysis and design with customer interviews, document review and resulted in a design document of workflow, prototyped web forms and an ERD (data model). The model was dead-on, requiring just a couple adjustments. Eighty hours of coding produced the forms and got us through the beta testing and demonstrations. Client goes live with a pilot test next week.
Sorry for the light blogging. Spent Thursday at LinuxWorld in Boston; got to see lots of vendors big (IBM, Intel, AMD, Novell, Red Hat) and small (X.org, LTSP.org, GNHLUG.org) and hang out with some cool folks. [Update: fixed malformed link above.]