Office Party? Let’s Tweet It

 

Across the room, a prodigious young culture curator, whose Brain Pickings blog has managed to attract fans as disparate as Pee-wee Herman and professors from M.I.T., was posting about “must-read books on the art and science of happiness.” Two Web developers from a company called Fictive Kin joked about Russian spammers. A ZZ Top song was playing. The office puppy was napping. A clipboard was going around for lunch orders.

As a group, the writers, Web designers, illustrators and social media figures who share the Studiomates collective in Dumbo have around a half-million followers on Twitter and many more on their blogs, Foursquare accounts and Facebook pages.

Yet it’s the offline interaction — the group lunches, the whiteboard brainstorming sessions, the Friday beer parties — that puts Studiomates at the forefront of an innovative new model for doing business.

It turns out that 140 characters in a Twitter post cannot compete with 26 characters in a Brooklyn loft.

Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks.

The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.”

Studiomates is an especially information-oriented bunch, and an influential one, too. In addition to her swissmiss blog and Twitter following of 200,000, Ms. Eisenberg is the founder of Creative Mornings, a popular monthly speaking series that has young designers in four cities talking.

Jason Santa Maria, 32, a graphic designer and the kind of free-thinking creative who makes magazines for people who make Web sites, has more than 175,000 Twitter followers.

The trio of graphic designers from Workshop, all based at Studiomates, creates much of the printed material for the TED Conferences and the New York Philharmonic.

Maria Popova (@Brainpicker to her 60,000 Twitter followers) delivers a steady stream of wonders and high-minded divertissement, like deep-space photography and Lego art, and recently began blogging for The Atlantic. Her impact score on Twitalyzer, an independent research group that tracks Twitter influence, puts her in the 99.9th percentile; she ranks higher than Anderson Cooper, Sarah Palin and Justin Timberlake.

Even the two Studiomates dogs, Pinky and the sleepy Mr. Toast, are on Twitter (albeit with fewer followers than Ashton Kutcher).

“The move to co-working is a move from a culture of me to a culture of we,” said Rachel Botsman, the author of “What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption.” “People are looking to express their individualism but want to do it in a more social way. They’ve experienced how to do that virtually on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Now they’re looking for that face-to-face interaction.” The number of co-working spaces like Studiomates has roughly doubled worldwide over the last year, said Joel Dullroy, an editor at?Deskmag, an online co-working magazine. In North America, the number increased to 342, representing a growth of 16 percent between October 2010 and February 2011, Mr. Dullroy said.

New York City alone has dozens of co-working spaces, from Pizza Island, the all-female collective of cartoonists in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to New Work City, an exposed-brick den of freelancers in Little Italy, open to anyone who can obey the simple house rules outlined by Tony Bacigalupo, a founder of the space: 1. Show up, 2. Bring some work to do, 3. Don’t be a jerk.

Not surprisingly, the earliest adopters of co-working came out of Silicon Valley. In 2005, Brad Neuberg was a freelance software programmer in San Francisco when he created the first co-working space in the city’s Mission District.

The San Francisco Co-Working Space, which has since closed, had a group-friendly atmosphere (clustered desks, hangout areas, lots and lots of coffee) common today at co-working places like Independents Hall in Philadelphia and Dogpatch, which provides desk space to aspiring entrepreneurs in Cambridge, Mass.; New York, and San Francisco.

“The giggle factor was high in the beginning because people always assumed you either worked for yourself or you worked in an office,” Mr. Neuberg said.

Today, even those who dabble in co-working have options. A “jelly” is the term for a free meet-up that brings freelancers together at a cafe or other public site on days when a housecat’s company is simply not enough. Web sites like Deskwanted, Loosecubes and Desktime connect independent workers with shared spaces by the day, week or month for a fee.

At lunch at Studiomates one day last month, most of the members gathered over takeout cartons at a communal table with a group of smart-looking visitors from m_ss_ng p_eces, a creative agency in Brooklyn. The guests were invited as part of a speaking series that has included founders of media and design companies like Kickstarter, Pinterest and Svpply.

It was hard to get a word in. The group’s conversation moved from negative comments posted on YouTube to “miracle berries” that turn the taste of sour foods to sweet to why Ms. Popova was walking around barefoot (she was raising awareness for Toms’ One Day Without Shoes campaign, she said). Nobody was checking e-mail.

“This is the first time I’ve had community at work,” said Ms. Popova, who also has a full-time job as Insight Patternist at TBWA Worldwide. She splits her time between Studiomates and TBWA’s Madison Avenue office since the advertising agency “sees the value of my being in an environment where I can keep a finger on the pulse of creative culture and tech,” she said.

Much of the content for her blog and Twitter feed comes from the casual conversations at Studiomates. “The day-to-day distraction level may be slightly higher,” Ms. Popova said. “But in terms of the influx of the building blocks of productivity — ideas, story tips, the interesting people who come in — an environment like this is priceless.”

If the emphasis is on ideas at Studiomates, the focus at General Assembly, a co-working space in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, is money. The 20,000-square foot “campus,” which opened three months ago and is already booked to its 100-seat capacity, has presentation rooms sponsored by Skype, sleek communal worktables and a list of free agent members including Chris Maguire, a founder of Etsy; Amanda Hesser, the former New York Times food writer and a founder of the Food52 cookbook project; and Chris Hughes, a founder of Facebook and coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

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Corner Office: Lars Bjork: Order Is Great. It’s Bureaucracy That’s Stifling

?This interview with Lars Bjork, C.E.O. of QlikTech, a data software company, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss or manager?

A. It was in 1984.? I had the opportunity to work in construction in New York, coming right out of undergrad.? I was sick and tired of school at the time. I didn’t want to study anymore.? My uncle had built one of the largest construction companies in the world, so he got me a job on the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York as an assistant supervisor on site.?

I was 22, and the men were double my age and tough.? And I think the only way I could go about it was just walk up and try to speak to them and try to earn their respect, which I did.? It took some time.? It was rough at the beginning, but I learned a lot from that.? It was hard, tough, but a very fair environment.

Q. How did you handle it?

A. They looked at me skeptically.? Who is this kid just out of school?? He doesn’t know anything about what you really do on a construction site like this.? But I was a foreigner, and they were curious, so they said, let’s hear him out, see who he is.?

Then it just comes down to proving yourself — things you give them advice on or things that you tell them that are solid and sound, and weren’t just pulled out of the air.? I’ve always been very open toward people.? I never kept anything to myself, and I just explained to people what was on the agenda for the day, and why we were doing this.

Q. What has been your approach to leadership?

A. I have never seen myself as a leader, someone who says I’m going to become a C.E.O.? I never did that.? And that goes even for where I am now.? I didn’t start as C.E.O. at this company. It was never something that I put on a map, where I said, I’m going to get there.? It’s more the result of me very much earning the respect of the people I work for, and they said, this is a guy we’re going to promote. ?Q. What else?

A. I’ve always been competitive, and I’m also curious.? I want to learn things, and that’s why, early in life, I put myself in challenging situations, like coming to the United States from Sweden to work here. I’m also more humble today than I was 20 years ago.? I am by no means the expert.? I’m not the smart guy in the room.? I might have an ability to bring people together and get the best team or have a sense of what’s needed. Being the coach — that’s sort of what it’s been for me.

Q. What were some other big lessons?

A. I once worked for somebody who managed in such a terrible way that I decided to never work with people who treat people badly.? Life is too short for that.? Let’s work with people who appreciate you and you appreciate them. It was such a terrible experience, so I left the company because I didn’t want to be associated with that.?

For me, it’s super-important — if I love my job, why wouldn’t I want the same thing for my co-workers? They will feel good and they will enjoy working and they will stay, and I know it will show up in the results as well.? There is no other way to do it.? Motivated people will go way further than anyone else.?

Q. Tell me about the culture at your company.

A. We developed five core values that we live by.? The first one is “challenge,” because we are a disruptive software company. Always challenge the conventional, because if you follow others, you can at best be No. 2.? And if you want to win, you’ve got to find your own way to the top. And we challenge each other at QlikTech, because if you’re complacent, you’re not going to survive.?

The second one is move fast — because we are building a hypergrowth company. It’s O.K. to make mistakes, just don’t make the same mistakes.? Learn from them. The third one is, be open and straightforward.? What that means is just be open if you think something is wrong.? We hear everyone out.? It’s important that everything is on the table, because somebody might have something brilliant to say.? But when we leave the room and we’ve decided on one thing and your view might not be incorporated in that, you still have to respect the decision.? ?

The fourth one is teamwork for results.? This is not about the individual.? This is about the team, the power of the team.? In our company today, we have 28 offices in 23 countries, so our team is a virtual one. You reach out and you speak to people everywhere, and you learn a lot from people that way, because there are a lot more similarities between cultures than you might think.?

The fifth one is take responsibility. You’re given authority to be part of a lot more than just your position, but some responsibility also comes with it.? And if you want to grow fast, you have to put into people’s DNA the idea of being cost-conscious. That’s why we all still travel coach.

 

Retooled Car Series Revives Summer Box Office Hopes

 

That is what should have happened to “The Fast and the Furious” car-racing series five years ago when a third installment, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” sputtered, selling about $62 million in tickets in North America, or 50 percent less than its predecessor.

But Universal Pictures didn’t give up, and a souped-up fourth movie, “Fast & Furious,” showed surprising strength in 2009.

Over the weekend, a new entry, “Fast Five,” rocked Hollywood by selling almost $84 million in tickets, by far the biggest opening of the year and — if the prayers of movie moguls are answered — signaling the beginning of a box-office turnaround.

“Relieved” is one word Adam Fogelson, Universal’s chairman, used to describe his state of mind on Sunday morning. “We made a lot of very specific and very strategic choices that were not obvious.”

Studios and theater owners urgently need a big summer. Domestic box-office revenue has fallen 14 percent in 2011, to about $3 billion, compared with the same period a year earlier, according to Hollywood.com, which compiles statistics on ticket sales. Higher prices, particularly for 3-D screenings, have probably kept some people at home. But the likeliest culprit is quality, which many studio executives concede has been lacking in a lot of releases.

The movie industry’s high-stakes summer season traditionally stretches from the first full weekend in May to Labor Day, when studios record about 40 percent of their annual box office revenue. With “Fast Five,” Universal decided to stretch the period, using the marketing slogan “summer starts early.” Ticket sales easily surpassed the record for the weekend, set last year by “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which took in $33 million.

“Fast Five” is an unusual sequel because of Universal’s fix-on-the-fly approach, but it is as good a marker as any of what the movie capital is counting on in the months ahead: sequels and more sequels. There are 10 this time around, including “Fast Five,” more than there have been in any summer in recent memory.

“They’re stacked one after another after another, which will help give the marketplace momentum,” said Phil Contrino, editor of BoxOffice.com.

Of these films, one in particular is expected to be a multiplex monster — “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” from Warner Brothers. It is the first Potter film to be released in 3-D and finishes out the series.

Expectations are also high for “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” (Walt Disney Studios), “Kung Fu Panda 2” (DreamWorks Animation) and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” (Paramount Pictures).

Pixar’s “Cars 2” doesn’t open until June 24 but has already broken one record: the biggest array of related retail merchandise, beating “Star Wars.”

Hollywood is taking some enormous risks in the coming stretch. One of the biggest gambles is “Green Lantern,” a space opera that Warner hopes will put to rest criticisms about the degree to which it has mined its DC Comics library for movie characters. Early buzz has been mixed, with questions about the visual effects and the skin-tight costume and mask worn by its star, Ryan Reynolds.

“There is also the worry of superhero fatigue,” Mr. Contrino said, noting that “Green Lantern” will arrive after Marvel’s “Thor” and 20th Century Fox’s much-anticipated “X-Men: First Class.”

Another question mark is “Cowboys & Aliens,” an expensive genre mash-up starring an aging Harrison Ford. It’s an alien movie set in the Old West, and some industry experts fear it could fall flat. On the positive side, the companies behind this picture, DreamWorks Studios and Universal, recently released new marketing materials to positive response.

Nobody needs hits more than Universal, which, despite a few bright spots like “Hop,” was recently labeled “a bomb factory” by the entertainment news site Deadline.com. The studio has a new corporate parent, Comcast, which is watching to determine whether management changes are needed.

“The Fast and the Furious” franchise, which made its debut in 2001 as a counterculture car movie, underscores how hard Universal executives are trying.

 

Weekend Project: Create a Paperless Linux Office

The paperless office: whether to combat clutter or save the forests, it has been the dream of many a computer user ever since the first electronic record of, well, probably anything. But it remains elusive, in no small part because whatever your personal intentions, you just cannot control the actions of other people, and many businesses today still insist on sending you printed bills and receipts. You can at least dispense with the filing cabinets, however, by scanning in the documents you need as searchable, full-text PDFs. Fire up the scanner and the weekend.

Clearly, you could just scan everything and save your documents as TIFF or JPEG files. Linux has solid support for USB desktop scanners (even all-in-one printer/fax/scan devices and those with sheet-feeders or other attachments) thanks to the SANE project. There is also no shortage of quality scan applications, like Kooka, XSane, or Simple Scan. But with images alone you lose the ability to search the text content of your documents — and remember, you can not only search within a particular document, but use GNU utilities to search your entire document collection.

That's where optical character recognition (OCR) comes in. OCR recognizes letterforms in the scanned document image and outputs actual text, which is precisely what we're after. But rather than run a command-line OCR program on every scanned image and produce a .txt file, it's better to combine the two into a single document, and hopefully a single step. That's the purpose of gscan2pdf, a lightweight GUI application that has a built-in SANE scanner interface, an OCR engine, and the ability to write PDF documents that embed the OCRed text and use the scanned image as a background for improved legibility.

You can grab the latest gscan2pdf build from the project's web site, including tar archives and RPM packages. If you use a Debian-based distro (including Ubuntu), it is already available through the package manager (and it is probably worth checking for in other desktop distributions as well). If you do install from source, you will need the SANE libraries, Perl, ImageMagick, and a few other common packages. The only dependencies you might not already have installed are the OCR engines: GOCR, Tesseract, CuneiForm, the support package Unpaper, and the DjVu image format library. Unpaper is a post-processor that cleans up scans for better OCR performance, and DjVu is an alternative image output format that, like PDF, preserves both text and images.

When you launch gscan2pdf, most of the main window is taken up by a preview panel with two tabs: "Image" and "OCR Output." Down the left is a thumbnail pane that will allow you to browse between individual pages as you scan them. The basic workflow is simple: Click on the "scan" icon in the toolbar, which opens up the floating scanner window. If you happen to have multiple scanners attached, choose the right one from the Device drop-down selector. There are seven tabs of controls and options you can configure, but at any point you can simply punch the "Scan" button at the bottom, and gscan2pdf will scan in the current page, run OCR on it, and slide it into the list of pages in the thumbnail browser.

The scan window stays open, so once you get your settings right, you can scan page after page without the interface disappearing or otherwise getting in your way. By contrast, if you have a lot of pages to scan in an app like XSane, you have to pause and save each one in order to continue.

Most of the mental energy you'll expend during this process is in getting the scanner settings right. The "Scan Mode" tab exposes every scanner feature your hardware supports, but in my experience it doesn't pick particularly useful defaults right out of the starting block. The scan resolution, for example, should probably be set to 200 or higher, and you will almost certainly want either color or grayscale image mode. Whether brightness, sharpness, and the various color-correction options improve your results is a toss-up; you can certainly get nicer looking images by fiddling with the settings, but unless the document you're scanning needs to be pristine and archival-quality for some legal reason, the real goal is getting better OCR results (and in the legal case, you should probably save the paper original anyway...).

I had trouble getting the "Preview" tab to work, and the "Optional equipment" tab gives you access to film and transparency scanner features, which is not the use case we're describing here, but it also lets you select an external document feeder if you have one. Primarily, however, good results are going to come from getting a quality scan, and choosing the right OCR engine.

You select the OCR engine from the "Post-processing" section of the "Page Options" tab. Among the recommended engines, I found Tesseract to give the best results, but it is worth running several samples to be sure: I'm certain that different types of document are likely to fare better under different OCR algorithms. The "Clean up images" option lets you set Unpaper features, such as filtering out solid blocks of color, ignoring borders, and automatically de-skewing the image. Deskewing can have a dramatic effect, but in my tests Unpaper could only correct a certain amount of skew, beyond which it got confused, and it did not cope well with pages using a lot of on indentations. Best advice: try to have a steady hand when you close the scanner lid.

OCR is never perfect, and you can open a built-in editor for the text in any page's "OCR Output" tab. When you're happy with the content, hit "Save" from the toolbar or the File menu. This brings up an intermediary file-format dialog rather than the normal GNOME "Save File" window, which can be confusing at first. Although you can save your scan as a flat image file (TIFF, PNG, etc.), the only output formats that preserve the OCR text and the scanned image are PDF and DjVu. You can also save your work as a "gscan2pdf session" for later resumption.

DjVu, for those unfamiliar, is an open format dedicated to scanned documents. It maintains separate text and background image layers, and can achieve a high compression level at good quality thanks to some clever encoding techniques. PDF is a more widely-supported format among applications, though, so it is the preferred choice. Oddly enough, gscan2pdf will export a scanned image to PostScript file format, but in doing so it embeds the image as a TIFF file yet does not appear to include the OCR text. I still haven't figured out what's going on there.

Arguably the best feature of gscan2pdf's document-saving process is that you can use it to create multi-page PDFs. When scanning pages, the "Page Options" tab has a feature that numbers each successive scan as the next page in a compound document. In the same tab you can mark pages as double-sided. These features together allow gscan2pdf to write multi-page PDFs that a modern PDF reader like Evince can display, search, and page-step through just like the output of a high-end DTP application.

Gscan2pdf does have its quirks. A friend of mine lamented recently that he could not get the application to produce quality scan images, noting that every page was visually skewed, like a parallelogram. Unfortunately, that sort of error is most likely to be a SANE problem, and since SANE uses different back-ends for different scanner families, it could be hard to track down.

You also need to go into the process fully aware of what OCR can and cannot produce. It is an imperfect science, and you will have to read through every page of text to correct character-recognition errors. Gscan2pdf does not have a built-in spellchecker, which is a toss-up on its helpfulness. Yes, it might be nice to have a spell-checking option (such as to catch your own typos when making corrections), but the truth is that OCR produces a completely different set of character-substitution mistakes than humans make when typing, so an automatic spellchecker based on ispell, aspell or other open source engines would be more aggravation than assistant. It would flag dozens and dozens of errors, but would be no help making suggestions, because the mistakes stem from the visual similarity of characters, not keyboarding or spelling trouble.

You have other options for converting paper documents to OCR'ed digital files, too. Kooka, for instance, lets you perform OCR in addition to scanning, but it lacks the automated output and PDF-generation features that make gscan2pdf so simple to use. Scan on.

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Five Best Linux Office Tools

The business office is where the Linux desktop should reign. Why? Linux is a reliable, stable, secure solution that would have any business user working day-in and day-out without fail. With an unheard of resistance to viruses, trojans, and worms, the office user enjoying the Linux desktop would have no concerns about down time as does the average Windows user. But what tools are there available for the usual office worker? Plenty!

With a nod toward what the usual business day looks like, I have assembled what I think to be the five must-have office tools for the Linux desktop. With this collection of tools, most office workers could get the overwhelming majority of their work done. The only tool I have left off of this list is the Web browser, as it is a tool everyone knows of and is included in every Linux distribution.

You will find that many of these tools are not included with the average Linux desktop. The good news is that they are all just a couple of clicks away, using the distribution's Add/Remove Software tool. So, with that piece of advice out of the way, let's get on with the software!

I have to start with the most obvious tool first. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is bound to become the King of the Linux desktop office tools. This piece of software offers everything anyone needs from an office suite: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentations, Database, Drawing tool, and Math Formula tool. LibreOffice also is one of the most versatile office suites, when it comes to inter-operation with other office suites (LibreOffice is compatible with all major office suites.) LibreOffice also offers a feature you won't find in the likes of MS Office -- extensions. With extensions you can extend the capabilities of this FOSS office suite well beyond the norm. A sample list of extensions include: PDF import, Report Builder, Non-linear Solver, Wiki Publisher, and more. Check out the LibrePlanet wiki for more extensions. Figure 1 shows the main LibreOffice interface, where each of the applications can be launched.

If you are looking for a replacement for the costly, often buggy accounting package you've been using, look no further than GnuCash. This double-entry accounting tool is filled with outstanding features that can do everything from:

Produce highly detailed reportsHandle on-line bankingManage stocks and bonds portfoliosManage customers and vendorsHandle multiple currenciesQIF/OFX importStatement reconciliationPowerful search toolCheck printingAnd much, much more

And what's best about GnuCash is you won't find it randomly crashing on you, demanding you switch to single-user mode, bringing your desktop to a crawl, or losing precious data. And although GnuCash does not currently offer a client/server mode, it is a feature that is being considered for future releases.

One of the most powerful features you will find in GnuCash is its reporting capabilities. From within the Reports menu, the following reports can be created:

Advanced PortfolioAsset PiechartAverage BalanceBalance SheetGeneral JournalGeneral ledgerLiability PiechartNet Worth BarchartCustomer ReportEasy InvoiceEmployee ReportPayable AgingReceivable AgingVendor ReportBudget ReportCash FlowExpense BarchartIncome StatementTransaction ReportAnd much more

Figure 2 shows the Account creation wizard for creating a Business account in GnuCash.

As you can see, GnuCash creates most of the standard accounts required for Business use.

Scribus is one of those tools that is often overlooked and under-appreciated. Scribus is, at it's heart, an incredibly powerful desktop publishing tool capable of handling nearly any task usually handled by far costlier tools. Scribs brings to the Linux desktop powerful page layout similar to that of PageMaker and QuarkXPress. And Scribus isn't just for office fliers, party brochures, and resumes. Scribus can be used to create full-color, full length books, texts, and more! Scribus offers the power of:

Color separationsCMYKSpot Color SupportICC Color ManagementHigh-quality, versatile (RIP-ready) PDF creationLayer supportTransparency supportAnd much more

With Scribus anyone can create anything from brochures to full-length, print-quality books. And with a very user-friendly interface, the learning curve is not nearly as steep as that of either PageMaker or QuarkXPress. Figure 3 illustrates the simple user interface offered in Scribus.

When Scribus is started it allows for the creation of various types of new files, or the opening of existing documents.

XSane, a graphical frontend for SANE. Although there are far easier scanning tools available (such as Simple Scan), you won't find many scanning tools with the power and flexibility of XSane. XSane offers the following features:

Color ManagementFiltersOCR ScanningSlide and film scanningFax supportEmail supportEnhancementHistogramBatch scanAnd more

The one issue many users might have with XSane is the interface, as XSane borrows from the The GIMP school of thought and offers a multi-windowed interface (see Figure 4.) Some users will have trouble getting used to this type of interface, but once accustomed to the interface, XSane is quite easy to use.

The XSane interface can be used with only the two main interface windows.

I almost hesitate to include Evolution in this list, but until a better groupware client becomes available for the Linux desktop, Evolution will remain the de facto standard. Evolution is to Linux what Outlook is to Windows, only without much of the bothersome issues (such as the PST/OST problems that often occur, or the huge hit Outlook can take on your system resources). Evolution even has an interface that will be immediately familiar to plenty of users (see Figure 5). There is plenty to like about Evolution:

Full desktop integrationNo viruses or wormsAdvanced searchingUser-defined filtersMultiple calendar viewsBuilt-in junk filteringWeb calendar supportMultiple account supportCustomized remindersiCalendar supportLDAP supportBuilt-in security and encryption

Some users will appreciate that Evolution also has (with the aid of an installable extension) the ability to connect to an Exchange server. Although this feature is still in heavy development, it does work and allows you near-Outlook functionality.

Without the groupware client, the Linux desktop would have a hard time working within an office setting. This is especially true when the business and/or office depends upon non-web-based shared calendaring. Fortunately, the Linux desktop does have Evolution, which is always improving.

The Evolution interface is even laid out similarly to that of Outlook (minus the pesky Ribbon Interface.)

There are many nay-sayers out there who believe that Linux is just not ready for the business desktop. But, as you can see, Linux has the basic functionality of the office desktop covered. And until you have seen Linux function in the office, you can not appreciate how efficient, reliable, and user-friendly Linux can be. If a business is looking to cut down on time spent cleaning their desktop PCs from viruses, trojans, worms, registry issues, or any other headaches associated with MS Windows, that business would be smart to give the Linux desktop a try. With the lack of down-time, users will be able to work more efficiently and IT expenses will plummet!

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