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Which other solutions? I'm currently looking for tools - right now a mac mini running osx server seems the way to go. But it's missing some stuff, what have yo

Which other solutions? I'm currently looking for tools - right now a mac mini running osx server seems the way to go. But it's missing some stuff, what have you found?

Silhouette 16y ago
> But it's missing some stuff, what have you found? The bottom line is, we didn't. Most of these business admin services seem to offer little more than a very simple database, a pretty UI, and a monthly bill. We write software for a living ourselves, so producing an in-house bug tracker or CRM system or project dashboard takes a matter of hours, maybe a few days if we add more power to it later. It's only worth outsourcing the tools if the relatively small amount of time it saves us outweighs the many downsides: time lost to set up and maintain an external system, monthly cash cost to use it, having to fit our process around their tool instead of the other way around, interoperability issues if tools have related purposes but data is locked in, relying on external infrastructure for access, etc. etc. That is only going to happen if the outsourced service offers a silky smooth set-up process, a tool that can be readily adjusted to our exact needs and still present a streamlined UI to match, immediate and convenient access to all the underlying data, and very low pricing, among other things. That's a pretty tall order, and frankly, none of the services we looked at seemed to be anywhere close. We do use external software to run things like mail and web servers, but it's standard stuff running on our own boxes. We are also looking at external services for tasks that are much more difficult/expensive to implement ourselves, such as payment processing and off-site back-up. But for basic business admin, things like bug tracking, project planning, CRM and the like, we concluded that it wasn't even worth looking at the freebie software projects that do it. In the time it would take to properly evaluate a few of them and determine whether they could meet our needs, plus the time to customise them to do so, we could have just written exactly what we wanted from scratch.

Which other solutions? I'm currently looking for tools - right now a mac mini running osx server seems the way to go. But it's missing some stuff, what have you found?

Silhouette 16y ago

> But it's missing some stuff, what have you found? The bottom line is, we didn't. Most of these business admin services seem to offer little more than a very simple database, a pretty UI, and a monthly bill. We write software for a living ourselves, so producing an in-house bug tracker or CRM system or project dashboard takes a matter of hours, maybe a few days if we add more power to it later. It's only worth outsourcing the tools if the relatively small amount of time it saves us outweighs the many downsides: time lost to set up and maintain an external system, monthly cash cost to use it, having to fit our process around their tool instead of the other way around, interoperability issues if tools have related purposes but data is locked in, relying on external infrastructure for access, etc. etc. That is only going to happen if the outsourced service offers a silky smooth set-up process, a tool that can be readily adjusted to our exact needs and still present a streamlined UI to match, immediate and convenient access to all the underlying data, and very low pricing, among other things. That's a pretty tall order, and frankly, none of the services we looked at seemed to be anywhere close. We do use external software to run things like mail and web servers, but it's standard stuff running on our own boxes. We are also looking at external services for tasks that are much more difficult/expensive to implement ourselves, such as payment processing and off-site back-up. But for basic business admin, things like bug tracking, project planning, CRM and the like, we concluded that it wasn't even worth looking at the freebie software projects that do it. In the time it would take to properly evaluate a few of them and determine whether they could meet our needs, plus the time to customise them to do so, we could have just written exactly what we wanted from scratch.