Living With Open Office

Microsoft Office is by far the most popular set of business applications in use today. By 'most popular' I mean most commonly used rather than 'most liked'. I believe it has become a standard for two reasons. First, there are what's called Network Effects. The value to me as a user of using Office increases based on the number of other people that are using Office. There is a great deal of value to being on the same platform as the people that I work with and exchange data with. The second reason that MS Office is so ubiquitous is due to learning. Once people are familiar with a way of doing things, it is difficult to change. Microsoft has historically benefited from the fact that users are familiar with their tools and have invested in learning how to use them.

I've got the new version of Office and it looks like Microsoft has abandoned the second reason for their success. The interface is not familiar and everything is in a different place! The suite requires a learning period that can be frustrating. The concept of tool-bars has been replaced by the 'ribbon'. In many ways it is an improvement on the interface but it can be frustrating to try and find the tool you need. We have not deployed this to anyone else in the office as I am worried about getting inundated with calls for help and I worry about the wasted productivity as users struggle through the learning period.

The cost of using MS Office is high. Not only is it several hundred dollars for each machine, but it will also be expensive in lost productivity if we are forced to upgrade to the new interface.

So what are the alternatives? There are two that I will be investigating. The first is Google Docs - a free web based suite of programs. The other is Open Office - a free open source set of applications. For the next while I will try to set aside my MS Office and use only these free tools. I will report back here!

We're on Wikimapia!

Well, we made it! We are now listed on Wikimapia. You can find us by searching for 'Space Database' or just by drilling down over the carpet factory:

When we first added this, voting buttons appeared to let other users respond to this listing. Enough users voted 'yes' to keep us on so now it is permanent. It is very easy to add in content. Help make this a more useful tool by putting in your own content!

Wikimapia

Wikimapia is a very interesting 'mashup'. It is a great example of how sophisticated applications can be created on the web using other, existing online technology and just a little bit of programming to customize a unique solution. In this case, the creators have used Google maps to deliver the map content and have layered over their own markup layer. Where available, places on the map are linked to articles in Wikipedia. They have used two existing content services and put them together to create a useful new tool.

The site creators have not had to do any of the data entry. Every day new and interesting places are added. The content and place descriptions are created by users of the site. Anyone can add a place and it becomes permanent once other visitors have given it enough positive votes.

And how is the site supported? How do they make money? Again, they have used an off the shelf solution by incorporating Google AdSense in the detailed place descriptions. Because these ads are content aware they will be relevant to whatever a visitor is searching for, and therefore most likely successful.

With some good ideas and just a little bit of know-how anyone can built really useful web tools - you just have the be the first to think of the idea!

Quintura

Here's a really cool new search engine.It works like a conventional search engine on one level in that it will return a list of pages that match your criteria. But it adds a very interesting and useful layer: a cloud of topics that it believes are related to your primary search. By clicking on each topic, new results are displayed.

And a really cool feature is that it can be embedded! Here it is:

UrbanDB

We've found this to be a great resource for getting basic building information before we start work on a job. It's a website with a detailed database of buildings. It's especially well documented and detailed in the Toronto area. You can find it at www.urbandb.com .

To price and plan a survey job properly we need to know what kind of building we are dealing with. This site gives us the year the building was built, the number of floors and a picture of the building.

The site has details on 3,949 buildings in Toronto. If you search on a Toronto address in Google, chances are urbandb will be somewhere at the top of the list. So is this a large company with a dedicated team of researchers to maintain the site and enter all of these details?- No!In fact it is the part time 'hobby project'of one guy.

Taylor is his name and he has built this site using open source technology. He has opened up the site to anyone who wants to help out by contributing information. He has succeeded in building his own Wikipedia of buildings!

Rod is modest about the success of his site "it takes a large number of volunteers to keep things running. Every little piece of information helps."

UrbanDB illustrates three important points. The first is the power and sophistication of open source technology that exists today. The tools that are now available enabled one person (although technically skilled) to put together an incredibly sophisticated site in their spare time. Secondly, web collaboration - getting users to contribute the content - is a great way to gather data. This site is populated by the work of volunteers that just happen to be interested in buildings. Finally, this project demonstrates how 'flat' the internet is. This site is more popular and probably has more traffic than dedicated commercial broker and building owner sites could ever hope for.