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This is the story of our recent attempt at Carson Systems to move from proprietary desktop-based software to various web-based and open source solutions, how they integrated with our existing set-up and the practical realities of getting a small group of people to migrate to a new system. With the recent acquisition of JotSpot by Google (JotSpot is an app we’ve been using for a while to manage some projects), it’s interesting to see where web-based solutions are succeeding or falling short right now, and what needs to change for them to really work well for your business.

What Every Office Needs …

Let’s start with the basics. Every web company, whether you’re doing design, development or anything else, needs the following software:

1. Text editor
2. Code editor
3. Graphics package
4. Storage
5. Backup
6. FTP
7. Chat/IM
8. Email
9. Calendar
10. Address book
11. Spreadsheets

As a company, if you don’t decide which packages your employees use in each of these categories they will go ahead and choose their own – resulting in a potentially incompatible environment.

Another problem with having everyone choose their own systems is that when something goes wrong, you have to know everyone’s unique setup and how to fix it. Any more than two people and you’ll end up spending 50 per cent of your time putting out IT fires. Not cool.

The value of having everyone use the same software and platform is that it makes your business very simple. It minimizes confusion, makes training easier, and allows people to pick up each other’s work when necessary, without having to learn a brand new system – not to mention that you’ll save cash in the process!

The Plan

I’m one of the founders of Carson Systems, a small company of five. Unfortunately, I’m also the Tech Support Bitch. (It’s funny how having a degree in Computer Science and knowing PHP will do that to you).

As soon as we hired our second full-time employee, I knew that we needed to minimize potential problems and complexity with IT. It was time to get everyone on the same system, using the same software. Here were my goals:

1. Affordable: We didn’t want to spend money if we didn’t have to
2. Reliable: It needed to be stable enough that we could rely on it
3. Easy to use: We didn’t want to spend tons of time on training

Our Setup

The first thing we decided to do was choose the platform. As three of us were on Macs and one of us (me) was on PC, I decided to ditch my Sony VAIO and get a MacBook Pro. I don’t want to go too much into the Mac vs PC issue (for fear of starting a flame war), but here’s why we chose to use Macs:

1. They’re well designed
2. They ship with good email and address book software
3. They don’t have crap pre-installed software to delete
4. They can also run XP for testing (using Parallels)

The second task was to pick all the software we would use. Here’s the initial list we decided on:

So if you add all of that up, we’re looking at about $173.75 per person. If we had chosen, say, Office and Studio 8 (the usual choices), the cost per person would have been nearer to $1699! But, could these alternatives cut it when it came to everyday use?

The results

Some of our choices worked brilliantly. Some sucked so bad we wanted to smash our heads against our monitors. Here’s the nitty-gritty:

Text editor

TextEdit turned out to be decent. There were some issues with Word documents not being displayed properly, but overall, we were pretty happy with it.

We also tried Writely (now part of Google Docs) which was a dream to use. The collaboration feature is especially useful. However, it’s a real problem to not be able to create or edit documents when you’re not connected to the web. This turned out to be the killer with Writely.

This presents a major problem with the “Office 2.0″ web apps. Writing documents, creating spreadsheets and sending emails are mission critical tasks. Not being able to do this while you’re off-line is a major issue.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that online office apps are definitely the future, but until wifi becomes globally ubuiquitous, these apps just aren’t viable. (Scrybe appears to get around this, enabling you to update in the browser while you’re offline – we’ll be trying this one out for sure!)

• Ended up using: Word
• Costs: $470 per user (Office suite – bought on eBay)
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1

Code editor

TextWrangler is BBEdit’s little brother. However, it doesn’t have a WYSIWYG interface, which proved to be difficult for our non-techie employees. The switch to TextWrangler has therefore cost us some time in XHTML/CSS training, but we feel it was worth it.

We really miss Dreamweaver’s built in FTP and WYSIWYG functionality, but it’s just too damn expensive if all you need to do is simple XHTML/CSS updates (and besides which, despite various upgrades towards achieving standards compatability, it still causes a few code slips).

• Ended up using: TextWrangler
• Costs: $0 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 7

Graphics package

We decided to go with Fireworks because it’s designed for web graphics. We use legitimate old versions that we’ve bought off eBay – all the fancy new features of new versions are kind of surplus to our requirements and although old versions of Fireworks can sometimes be unstable on Intel Macs, it hasn’t been too much of a problem.

• Ended up using: Fireworks
• Costs: roughly $80 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 2

Storage

As we’ve built DropSend, we decided to “eat our own dogfood” and use it for our shared company storage. We’re using the Business Plan ($99 per month), which gives us a shared place to dump logos, important files, and so on – great for our needs.

DropSend needs a little bit of improvement, really. Once we’ve developed a DropSend Storage Drive that just mounts on your desktop, it’ll be perfect for shared company storage.

Initially, we tried sharing a .mac drive, but it turned out to be fairly slow and expensive.

• Ended up using: DropSend
• Costs: $99 per month for the Business Plan
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 2

Backup

I did a ton of research on this and SuperDuper always came out on top. It’s easy to use, dirt cheap and is completely bug free. Every Thursday, everyone hooks up their external Seagate 250GB drive and starts up SuperDuper. It copies only what has changed since the last backup, so it’s very quick.

• Ended up using: SuperDuper
• Costs: $0 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1

FTP

I had heard good things about Cyber Duck and it was free, so we gave it a try. Unfortunately it crashed all the time and lacked the functionality we needed.

We then tried Transmit and were completely blown away. One of its best features is that it allows you to simply drag a file you’ve edited onto the Transmit icon and it automatically uploads it to the correct place on your site.

The only thing that really annoys me about Transmit is that when you want to get a file, you have to make sure that it goes into the right directory on your local drive. It would be much easier if you could just click “Get” on the file you wanted and it knew where to put it on your local drive, based on the directory structure. (Let me know if you know how to do this!)

Using Dreamweaver’s built in FTP was way easier than using TextWrangler and Transmit, but Dreamweaver is just too expensive to justify the “hassle savings”.

• Ended up using: Transmit
• Costs: $29.95 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 5

Chat/IM

We decided to have everyone sign up for an AIM account and just use iChat. It’s already installed, works well, supports video chat, and is completely free. Perfecto!

• Ended up using: iChat
• Costs: $0 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1

Email

Choosing an email program was pretty hard. Most people were really attached to Entourage or Outlook, but we were trying to move away from Office, so decided to centralize on Mail as it comes pre-installed with all Macs. It’s solid and bug free.

The hardest part (for me) was giving up Outlook’s To-Do List functionality. To replace this, we switched to recording our To-Dos in OmniOutliner, which comes free with all Macs.

Another really frustrating thing about Mail is that you can’t use multi-colored flags. Call me crazy, but I’d like to have a couple of different color flags when I flag emails. With Outlook I used to flag work emails that needed follow-up with a red flag; personal emails that needed follow-up were flagged with a green flag.

Mail can’t do this. I’ve not figured out a good solution to this and it drives me nuts.

However, the IT savings of getting everyone on Mail are huge. Using one system (instead of a mix of Entourage, Outlook and Mail) makes IT support extremely simple (even non-existent!)

• Ended up using: Mac Mail
• Costs: $0 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 7

Calendar

Finding a good shared company calendar turned out to be a frustrating experience. You can share your iCal calendars by publishing them, but those who subscribe to a calendar can’t update it. Argh.

We decided to create a Google Calendar and have everyone subscribe to it in iCal. This works well except that you cannot update it directly from iCal. You have to log into Google Calendar. Again, argh.

As you can see, neither solution is easy. However, at least Google Calendar enables everyone to make updates.

• Ended up using: Google Calendar
• Costs: $0 per user
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 5

Address Book

Finding a good shared company address book is also a nightmare. If you have an LDAP server you can apparently share a company address book that everyone can update. If you don’t have an LDAP server, you can share your Address Book with everyone, and they can update it. BUT you all have to have a .mac account!

Evil Apple! So we all signed up for .mac accounts and guess what? It doesn’t work properly. It appears that if you share your address book with more than one person, and you give them all rights to update the address book, the synchronization starts screwing up. At least that’s what happened to us.

So we still haven’t found a good solution to this. Any ideas would be appreciated!

• Ended up using: Address Book
• Costs: $65 per user (for .mac account)
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 8

Spreadsheets

Trying to avoid the expense of Excel, we thought we’d give Tables a try. It sucked so bad that we’ve decided it’s actually worth paying the extra money for Excel.

After using Excel for years and being used to its powerful features, Tables was a complete nightmare. Not to mention very buggy. It was painful. On top of these troubles, it saved files in a proprietary format that was incompatible with Excel!

The only major drawback to Excel is that it’s hard to collaborate and share documents. I know that Microsoft will be changing this (they’ll have to), but right now there’s no good way to do this. So for spreadsheets that we need to share, we use Google Spreadsheets. It’s a great solution!

• Ended up using: Excel
• Costs: Part of office suite
• Hassle scale (1 = no hassle, 10 = huge hassle): 1

Conclusion

By choosing this suite of office tools, I believe we’ve made big savings in tech support costs and time management. However, it was definitely painful in the beginning when we made the switch-over.

Ideally, I’d like to use web apps for all of our needs, but it’s just not feasible until wifi becomes ubiquitous. I believe this will happen very soon, so it’s only a matter of time. However, until then, we’ll have to live with this hotchpotch of apps.

I hope that this account of our experiment is helpful for others out there running a small business. You can definitely save costs on software and tech support by being a bit creative.

Have Your Say

I’d be very interested in hearing your thoughts and experiences with choosing software for your small company. Please share!

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