Friday, April 19, 2002

Handling Layoffs without Grace (Enterasys) Just 9 days ago, I wrote about Ray Hunter, an Enterasys employee in Salt Lake City who was laid off.  He'd been using his enterasys email once he left since the company said he could.  Today my emails to him bounced.  Yeah, I know he doesn't work for the company any more but how hard is it to grant 30 or 60 days of pop service?  Or just an email alias? Heck, if you are worried about the person still looking like they work for the company, just configure the mail server to append on send "This person is no longer an Enterasys employee but we are providing 60 days of email service while he/she transitions" at the bottom of every email.  Not only do you make people's lives easier but you also make yourself look good.  Are HR departments all clueless? Note: I know nothing about the Enterasys situation but this, to me, feels sleazy.  Original Article Ray's Resume comment [] 2:53:58 PM     Open Source and Non-Profit I met with a very interesting potential client yesterday.  It's a non-profit group that places people into jobs and then tracks their history.  Small office, all Microsoft Access DBs.  They need to get "online" and wanted to talk about options.  Here's who was in the meeting: Their internal IT guy who only knows Microsoft stuff.  A very nice guy, very smart. A retired 28 year Gillette executive, on loan to them from an Executive Help service, who got involved to help build a 3 year IT plan.  He was a big systems person but really, really sharp.  He brought a real systems perspective to the meeting. I proposed a pretty standard Open Source technology approach: DB: MySQL or PostGres Application Language: PHP Webserver: Apache (what else?) Hosting: Standard cheap hosting, something between $25 and $100 per month Here is what was absolutely amazing to me.  They bit!  They're wicked interested and there is no Microsoft at all in the solution.  They had no experience with Open Source at all but they understood the benefits and I'm looking at a 5 to 6 figure contract.  Haven't gotten the work yet but this is amazing.  Anyway, it strikes me that the real benefit for non-profits of Open Source is that they can: Spend their $ on what matters to them: The Application They can spend more $ on the people they are trying to help That's pretty cool.  Sure, I'm a consultant so I'm biased but it's still cool.   comment [] 9:55:21 AM

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