Gavin Henry wrote, quoting me: > > What if you're a company and you want to *buy* the above? You don't > > want a server, you don't want an IT guy, you just want a Web panel > > where you can tick "give us an issue tracker", and that's that. > > Employees plug in their laptop, aim a web browser and/or VPN-thingy, > > and it just works. > > That's a hard problem too solve. When hosting companies do this kind of > thing, > i.e. they provide hosted services, they tend to pick certain things. For > example you don't see many mod_perl or postgresql hostings, just because they > aren't that popular. > > This is where I think the problem is, demand. It's a lot to invest in setting > up and configuring all the services you mentioned, and a gamble if you don't > know/have idea if they will all be used.
Hi; I suspect you're right, but it still doesn't quite compute for me. I mean, these things aren't _that_ hard to set up, and keeping diff customers out of each other's bits is getting easier (with virtualized servers and the like). A bit of web hacking to make a "user interface" and you're away, no? The point is, if a hosting company gives me three of the seven things I need, I still have to go hire one of those cranky IT types for the other four (and then might as well let him/her do all seven). Maybe my idea that "these eleven things will satisfy 93% of all SMEs" is nonsense :-) My perception is that JotSpot (http://www.jot.com/) is trying to play in _exactly_ this space. It's a wiki with pre-packaged "applications" hung onto it; that plus a nice e-mail setup (those are available) might get you quite a long way. We'll see. All further thoughts welcome! Will _______________________________________________ Scottish mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/scottish
