Consulting
When managing a project it is helpful, but not essential, to have expertise in the application.
For consulting, experience is often the essence of a successful outcome.
We have been deeply involved in
- ERP systems, manufacturing and inventory control
- route sales, and point of sale systems
- general business accounting
- barcoding and inventory tracking
- wireless LAN and WAN
We have also had exposure to a wide variety of applications,
providing the synergy to draw together innovative and successful solutions to unusual needs.
When next you require a solution in a field of our expertise, please call us for consulting services.
Open Source
Though we do a good deal of work with proprietary software systems,
we are pleased to be supporters of Open Source software development.
Open Source software benefits from the input of many skilled developers who take pride in producing works of high quality.
Widely used Open Source products are tested by multitudes of people around the world, and benefit from their user community who enthusiastically contribute the knowledge and experience they have gained with the products.
The result is robust, well featured products which are continually evolving and improving.
Support is readily available from the developers and from the user community.
If you wish it, paid support can normally be obtained by prior arrangement.
We use, support and/or recommend the following listed packages:
- Linux: we use RedHat, but there are other popular packages (Mandriva, Ubuntu and Debian for example)
- Bluefish and Quanta HTML project editors
- Interchange and Minivend e-Commerce packages
- Perl, Perl/Tk, PHP and Ruby as well supported and easy to implement programming languages
- Postgresql as a highly scalable SQL database with excellent features and programming support (MySQL is good, too)
- GIMP for image editing and graphics
Open Source software products are frequently more reliable and perform better
than equivalant commercial offerings.
It is not unusual to discover that a problem with a commercial product lacks resolution after a protracted period of time, or even has no resolution available, despite paid support contracts.
Questions and problems with Open Source products are widely addressed on related news forums.
Rarely is a genuine bug reported.
The great majority of questions could have been answered by a user diligent enough to refer to the documentation or to an historical news feed.
Those which are new often get extensive discussion and usually are addressed quickly by someone who knows the right answer.
