An Easy Way to Provide Immediate Value to Your Customers

Why pay for a text editor when I can download one for free?  Why even pay for an office suite for that matter?  Open Office is F-R double E and can do all (or at least most) of the heavy lifting the current market leader does.  Did I mention it’s free?  And it scales.  This has to be one of the lowest hanging fruits in the basket.  Make sure your service offering pitches Open Office as an alternative office productivity suite.  You will attract more customers as well as demonstrate alignment to your customer’s needs.

Open Office does not come with an e-mail editor so you’ll need to include one.  Build a Microsoft Outlook deployment process as well as one for the complete Office Suite.  That way, no matter which option your customer chooses, you'll have an automated product to supply and maintain that order.

Technical Realization:  Create a deployment script for Open Office and associate with your ‘Software Deployment.Open Office’ group.  Utilize a remote cache and extra data fields (assigned to the Client Object) to personalize deployment.  Conclude with an Extra Data Field for one-click deployment (extra points for an Extra Data Field on the Computer Object for exceptions.)  Do the same for Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Office.

Business Alignment:  A dollar a month, per workstation, per title.  Call it software maintenance where you guarantee comprehensive consistency, automatic updating and delivery.  This product is just one of many to build and with each you will lock in a reoccurring billable while stabilizing and homogenizing your customer’s environment.