Dear OpenOffice.org Team, I have been using OO.org products for about three years now and I have to say that ever since I have been very satisfied with the performance of the office suite. The only two issues I encountered were badly designed tools to create statistics and Pivot tables and OpenOffice Draw still has a some way to go until it can stand up to Microsoft Publisher. I hope you will improve these two features anytime soon.
But today I am actually writing this email, because I had a great idea to combine OpenSource knowledge with a highly integrated office suite such as OO.org. Parts of Writer, Calc and Base should be blended together to make up a complete new application: An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution for especially for small businesses that don't have the financial capacities to get proprietary software. I am working in a small office at an electrician's business and we had already talked about setting all the computers at the accounting department up with Ubuntu/OpenOffice to save on license fees. The only problem has been the missing support for our Windows-ERP solution that was created by the local company Replica. There are already some OpenSource ERP solutions on the market and they all seem to work very well, but what most ERP's are missing, is an integration with an OfficeSuite to improve the performance and make accounting work easier. The whole programme should be based on a powerful SQL server that manages the database and a professional support system which helps people when they encounter difficulites. This way, the OpenOffice.org project could offer the free version of OpenOfficeERP to all the interested users and sell service packages that include delivery, installation, migration and support for small fees that help contributing to the OpenOffice.org project. A lot of businesses would see the incentives and start using OpenOffice.org+ERP on their computers and OpenOffice could finally stand up to meet it's opponent on the same height. I would be very interested in hearing what you think of the project and I would do my best to help developing it. My best regards, Andreas Pichler, Italy
