whiz kid saves business lots of money with Ubuntu

[Lars Noodén]

Here's a really positive article about a small business saving lots of money with the help of a smart 5th grader and Ubuntu:

http://www.meathchronicle.ie/news/roundup/articles/2013/02/13/4014435-computer-whiz-11-saves-businessman-thousandsbr/

[Lucradia]

Too bad it's not from the USA. Wish we had articles like that here.

[mips]

With a surname like that he can only be from South Africa originally ;)

[mike acker]

With a surname like that he can only be from South Africa originally ;)

it's an excellent article

right now we are watching closely the compatibility between LibreOffice 4.0 and the other "office" system

LO 4.0 is much better than the previous LO 3.5 but i think they need to solicit testers to check for and report compatibility problems particularly LO saving into the OOXML formats

saving into OOXML is probably not as necessary as many users will think.

generally when a document is to be sent to another party .PDF format should be used. only when collaboration is needed will the ooxml problems become an issue

[kurt18947]

In the U.S. at least, I wonder if the defacto lock-in of small business to Quickbooks may prove as much or more of an issue than MSO lock-in. MSO can be installed and work with WINE if necessary, Quickbooks cannot and I'm not sure there's a viable replacement for businesses. For instance, CPAs usually know Quickbooks, they may not know or care to learn GnuCash.

[mips]

In the U.S. at least, I wonder if the defacto lock-in of small business to Quickbooks may prove as much or more of an issue than MSO lock-in.

The database portion can run on linux and they also have a client for Android. Maybe it can run on Android x86.

[lz1dsb]

With a surname like that he can only be from South Africa originally ;)
As far as I've read, "van" is kind of like the equivalent of the German "von". And "van" is quite common with Dutch surnames. But there are also a lot of Dutch surnames in South Africa, so who knows :)

Anyway, a pretty nice article indeed. I hope that many other small and medium sized businesses will recognized the power of open source and Linux in general.

[kurt18947]

The database portion can run on linux and they also have a client for Android. Maybe it can run on Android x86.

I could see it working if there's an online version of Quickbooks like there is TurboTax. There may be, I haven't been involved with Quickbooks for several years. The question would then become are businesses willing to use an online accounting package and have their financials 'in the cloud'? Warranted or not, there are likely to be security concerns.

[PIE09gbLmgG6]

I've been trying to move minds in my school district over to the idea...using Ubuntu would be a great asset here...and much cheaper than what we are using.

ego-

[ikt]

Wish I was that good when I was his age :)