[Wylug-discuss] November Meeting and Future Talks

[Dave Fisher]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 02:54:06PM +0100, Mike Goodman wrote:
> Or, how about a practical exercise? 
<snip>
> The sequence should be something like:
> 
> 1. Enquiry in (phone, email, fax, site response) - where/how to log it?
> (plenty of options).
> 
> 2. Response to enquiry - where to log it?.
> 
> 3. Enquiry firms up - action points and where to log them?
>    or, nothing happens - how to deal with this situation, to leave, file
> elsewhere or delete? (depends on business type, discussion of
> possibilities would be useful) .
> 
> 4. Confirmation, contractual or similar documentation.
> 
> 5. Project management documentation if necessary.
> 
> 6. Invoicing/Payment/Receipt documents and feed figures into management
> and P&L accounts.
> 
> I'd be happy to lead a discussion to start the ball rolling, which
> should take rather more than the first ten minutes if there's enough
> interest. Participants could help by stating reasons why they prefer or
> recommend a particular method to handle any stages, and why one or
> another database should be the driver.

Hi all,

I'd appreciate some guidance from the membership on this proposal.

While I desparately need meeting content, and this proposal covers a
number of topics which interest me personally, a number of concerns
spring to mind:

  1. This lumps together a vast number of topics and issues, which may
  lead to a discussion that lacks focus and gives insufficient attention
  to the sub-topics involved.

  2. This is a Linux _users_ group not a small business network.  While
  many activists (including myself) are self-employed, my guess would be
  that most members are not and would be more interested in technical
  matters than business matters.

  3. Most of the content could be covered by a few talks/sessions on the
  more specific topics of Customer Relations Management (CRM), Document
  Managent (DM) and Project Management (PM).  
  
  I'd be inclined to think that PM and CRM are only 'on-topic' insofar
  as they refer to open source CRM/PM 'solutions'. 
  
Document management, on the other hand, is a more generic software issue
which appears to be very much 'on-topic' (given recent discussion on the
relative merits of DTP, wordprocessing, typesetting, scribus, LaTeX,
troff, Xfig, Inkscape, OOo, etc).

As it happens, I have been toying with the idea of doing something on
this topic myself; specifically, on programmatically integrated document
management using XML data to tie together stuff like request tracking,
billing and publishing.  

As you can see, I am probably experiencing a slight conflict of interest
here, so I'd appreciate other people's opinions.

Dave