In praise of Open Standards

I am working with others, spread across the country, on a project. As it is for charity, we are all working in our own time on our personal computers, not all together in one office. Now, how are we to share information if someone works on Windows and another works on Linux?
Of course, there is OpenOffice - which I have used successfully for months to send documents to colleagues who only use Word. Now I have added to my list - GnuCash to handle accounts written with Quicken, MDB Tools to read and import Access databases into MySQL, and a diagramming package called Dia that works on both Windows and Linux.

Data conversion woes

I needed to contact my utility supplier the other day. I could not get access to the web site as I hade done previously, so I ended up phoning them. The young man who answered could not have been more helpful, and more apologetic! It seems that they had moved to a new database system and this was linked to the web access. Now, with a supplier you can have a delivery address that is not the same as the address that you send bills to. It is reasonable that if one is blank then the same address is used for both.

However, the change to the web interface meant that access that was originally controlled by billing address was now controlled by delivery address, and in my case it was blank. That meant I could not access the web site until the customer support person altered the records on the database.

He said that they had spent a long time doing the change and testing it. But consider this - if you have 5 million customers and your data conversion process is 99.99% perfect that will still leave you with 500 customers whose records have failed in some way.