Microsoft rethink

 

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Don’t get me wrong, I like Microsoft. Not Windows which is pretty average but I like Office and Exchange and things like that. Why? Because I’ve used Lotus and Lotus is shit. Going to Exchange and Office made my work life so much easier. I’ve also used NeoOffice and Open Office and though there not shit, they’re not Office either. I don’t care what the open software fanboys say, these are no substitute for the Microsoft system. 

 

In a previous post, I extolled the virtues of Microsoft Business Dynamics and I still hold to this view. It’s an amazingly well thought out system that gives you end to end customizable ERP and CRM. It really is awesome. What I didn’t tell you is that it’s friggin’ cipplingly expensive. Our first year cost to implement a Dynamics solution was pretty close to a million bucks. There’s also the insane licensing costs each year to consider. Needless to say our wild enthusiasm for this system disappeared in an instant when the quote came in. 

So we went to Microtel. Not nearly as awesome but pretty good and affordable. We only bought the ERP. It was a twentieth the cost of Dynamics and does about 95% of it. With the money we saved we hired a web-designer, Nick, who is an open standards enthusiast with skill in PHP, MySQL, HTML and CSS. He has converted us to Joomla based systems for our web design and MySQL for our databases. Recently his mate Greg joined us and he is pretty bloody good as well. The advantage this gives us is incredible. For the cost of some pre-paid Joomla CRM framework ($295) and some coding time, we have a cross enterprise CRM that talks to Microtel and all our eCommerce. It is completely customizable, scalable and mostly free. We can also prepackage our solutions and resell them. 

I’m not slagging off on Microsoft or ASP or MS-SQL but the capability you get with open standards MySQL and PHP leaves Microsoft for dead. If we took the Dynamics solution we would have all the solutions to our needs in a formidable package but going open standards gives us the same or better capability, mostly free and resellable. Our coders will be revenue positive in a few months as we have set up an IT design company with them and will on-sell the modules we design. Nice.