On 06/04/13 06:43, Chris Pelon wrote:
Hi All

I run a small business IT services company in the US and we have just started to play with the SME 8 software. So far it seems like a very nice project, and it would be only natural for us to help improve it.
I run a small business IT services company in Australia. I've been using SME since 2000.


 1. I would have to agree that the marketing message of SME needs
    work.  The current site somewhat works for technical information
    but does a horrible job explaining what the server can do for
    small businesses.

There's no marketing message because that's not what the whole thing is really about. It's not the job of the developers or the community to explain what the server can do for small businesses. Thats your/my job. That's how it works, and why we can legally bill a customer $2,000 (or $2,000,000) for a copy of the software under the GPL and pay nothing back to contribs.org or Shad or anyone else -- provided that we can sleep at night of course!

 1. In my opinion, the primary competitor to SME is Microsoft Windows
    Small Business Server.  Microsoft has announced that they will be
    discontinuing SBS as a product. This will create a great
    opportunity for SME as many small businesses will be searching for
    a SBS replacement.

I agree with the second part of the comment, but in my experience anyone who can afford a legit copy of SBS will do so and not even consider SME. Perhaps a more realistic competitor is pirated versions of windows server! If you can sell someone out of SBS to SME that's fine-and-dandy but it's very easy for other people to come in and say "Oh my god this stuff is so dodgy I can't believe..." and have the poor business owner believe them! Often the sales guy believes it too, which doesn't help.

 1. Has the idea of paid commercial support been explored.  I for one
    would be interested in offering this.


http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=38535.0

The core business model (IMHO) is that you-and-I provide paid commercial support to the end businesses with back-end donations (tithes? Whatever you like really) to the paypal account mentioned in other posts.

I have subscribed to the mailing list and hope to add/contribute to the project as needed/asked.

Cool!
Let me know how I can help.

At the moment I think it's $ and bug reports and any other help with V9, but I'm not helping much so I'm not sure. ;)
-Chris


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