Re: [Fsfe-uk] An ignorant question?

[ian]

On Mon, 2003-06-09 at 22:05, Neil Darlow wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Monday 09 Jun 2003 9:34 pm, ian wrote:
> > SQL Ledger?
> 
> I haven't used it myself but the very name would make "Doris on the Front 
> Desk" run for the hills.

So change the name. Not difficult. Call it Flossy Accounts ;-)

> I can see the technical merit of a web-accessed database-driven accounting 
> system but I'm not convinced it's a good general purpose solution.

We use Sage and I can't see it does anything that could not be done web
based. If we had time I'd make some effort to shift to SQL ledger but
its not a trivial task as we have some other ahem proprietary software
we need to link to it. In fact some things would be an advantage as we
are on a network and our Finance Director could more easily work from
home.

I think I heard IBM were working with Sage to Port the version above the
one we use to Linux. That would be for companies with 50+ employees I
think.

> People are used to working in their own, friendly, desktop environment and 
> something more integrated with Gnome and KDE would be more acceptable to
> the average desktop PC user.

Which people are not used to working with a web browser? If you are
talking about one man companies, perhaps but as soon as you have enough
people to run a network, I can't see too much reason not to use a client
server system. In fact the individual could out-source their accounts to
someone else but still view them etc over a secure web browser. Why tie
it to KDE or Gnome or even Linux if its not necessary?

> For the accountancy professional sophisticated graphing and reporting are
> also required.

Why is that not possible wit a SQL data base? I would have thought that
it would be a lot less work to link outputs to say OO.org Calc and plot
graphs or indeed a more dedicated graphing program than write the whole
lot from scratch. Thought that was the point of Open Source really.

>  While this could be achieved in a browser-based environment,
> I doubt the wisdom of doing so.

Why? To me it seems that browser base should be the preferred first
option to give maximum choice of system used. Unless there is a very
good reason not to, do it on as open a standard as possible.

-- 
ian <address@hidden>