[Wylug-discuss] November Meeting and Future Talks

[Anne Wilson]

On Monday 24 Oct 2005 15:58, Dave Fisher wrote:
>
>   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.
>
In view of 2., I think a whole evening on business topics would probably 
be unwise, but a series of topics spread over sessions is perfectly 
reasonable, IMO.

>   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'.
>
Not just those, but the whole business of what software is available to 
us, and how they can be used.  Maybe two or three people who do use 
CRM, or for that matter, general accounting packages, could get 
together and talk about the pros and cons of the various options - 
assuming that there *are* options :-)

> 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.
>
Personally I'm in favour of more of this sort of stuff.  Technical 
issues must and will continue, but real-life solutions to problems that 
many people face are also needed, both in longer presentations and in 
short informal talks where people can say what they have used/tried, 
and the strengths and weaknesses.

Anne
-- 
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