Fwd: Knomos in Australia and elsewhere
Stefano Sutti was kind enough to respond to my earlier post about
Knomos in Australia. He has given permission for me to post his reply
to the list, which I now do below. Knomos is a very promising
project. I'm looking forward to version 1.0d which will be out soon.
regards,
Darryl Barlow
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Studio Legale Sutti <maildesk@sutti.com>
Date: 21-Oct-2005 20:48
Subject: Knomos in Australia and elsewhere
To: Darryl Barlow <dgbarlow@gmail.com>
Cc: dev@linuxlex.org, Gianluca Gilardi <gianluca.gilardi@sutti.com>,
michel morelli <michel.morelli@sutti.com>, Massimo Chieruzzi
<massimoc@creativeweb.it>
Dear Darryl,
I was forwarded your message concerning Knomos which was circulated in
the "Debian-lex" list. Please feel free to circulate my reply also there
if you believe it may be of interest.
Let me thank you first for your interest in our little Open Source project.
Yes, the application was developed having in mind Italian and other
continental legal systems where public tariff-based systems exist which
must be supported either for billing purposes, or because the tariff is
the criteria applicable for the recovery of legal costs from the losing
party or the debtor in litigation and arbitration.
Knomos automatically calculates the amounts involved, on the basis of
the tables available and of the specifics of each matter, but
i) such accounting stays conveniently out of the way if one is not
interested , and just bills by the hour or by any other method;
ii) it could theoretically be useful elsewhere for firms wishing to
develop and apply a "private" tariff system in dealing with a given
client or a plurality thereof (e.g., the price of one letter in a matter
worth "x" is "y"), something which is for example very widespread
amongst patent attorneys, including in common-law jurisdictions; the
tables used by the program to make the necessary calculations are in
fact freely configurable and extensible by each administrator.
We are however very proud of Knomos's sophisticated hourly billing
features. Each user is assigned a hourly rate - which is hardly a great
achievement -, which is taken by default from the higher rate amongst
rates applicable to groups of which he is a member, if any; but this
rate can be altered to a fix amount, or in percentage, for specific
clients, kinds of matters, single matters. Additionally, for specific
clients, kinds of matters, or single matters, fixed rates can be defined
which overcome individual rates entirely. Last but not least, the result
can still be corrected before being "dropped" in the field to be used
for billing, but the original value is however kept for verification,
statistical and other possible internal purposes.
As far as the language versions available, it happens that most of them
have been released at a very early stage of development, exactly to
allow people to have an early experience of the package, and perhaps
start working on additional language versions.. The version 1.0d, which
is due in some 15 days should complet and fix the current "pidgin
English" version and add German, French and perhaps Spanish to the
languages already available.
All news concerning future developments, as well as some documentation
under way on how to install, configure and use Knomos, along with a
brief description of its philosophy, are and will be made available in
different languages at http://www.knomos.org.
Setup: this is a sore point. Actually, not only do Knomos offer very
limited setup instructions in English, but this is also the case for
Italian or any other language. The pure truth is while we have obvious
pressures to fix and develop the product for our own use, including that
of SLS members who are not Italian mother-tongue, we *know* how to
install it, and accordingly the development of an automated or
well-documented procedure to do that remains a relatively low priority
in comparison with other objectives.
In our experience, however, most people who know their way around
Apache, MySQL and PHP ultimately succeed in installing and configuring
Knomos. We are also happy to provide some basic assistance to colleagues
who may want to call our headquarters to get some hints.. OK, this is
far from ideal and from the slick and polished experience one may have
with things like SUSE 10, but this for the time being is the simple truth.
Yours sincerely,
--
Stefano Sutti, LL.M.
Managing Partner
-------------------------
Studio Legale Sutti
Via Montenapoleone 8
20121 Milan, Italy
Central e-mail: maildesk@sutti.com
Web http://www.sutti.com
Tel. +39 02 76204.1
Fax +39 02 76204806
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