There is an enormous amount of functionality available to you at little or no cost. Unless you have clear and compelling reasons, you should always make use of these resources before spending significant amounts of money on commercial alternatives.
Often, the biggest technology costs businesses and organizations experience is after the hardware purchase when they have to obtain the software do the actual work required. Among these software costs often the single largest expense is “office” software, specifically a suite that includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database. Many also require a presentation package. Obviously the reason the office suite is so expensive is because most businesses need several such installations and they are led to believe that the only solution is Microsoft Office.
There are better solutions for most of us.
For routine office applications, we recommend OpenOffice. Aside from having zero cost, enabling you to put it on as many employee workstations as you want, OpenOffice also is more secure than Microsoft’s commercial offerings for two very important reasons:
- First, OpenOffice is not as large a target for hackers. There is less thrill in hacking into open source software and since fewer businesses use open source there is less opportunity for the hackers.
- Second, OpenOffice does not whore itself all through the operating system the way that almost all Microsoft applications do, and most certainly Microsoft Office does.
OpenOffice contains the core applications that you will need:
Writer, the word processor that will read and write Microsoft formats and more importantly can save your documents in the international standard OpenDocument format. Writer also natively allows you to export to the web or pdf. without add-ons. Writer will also directly connect to your e-mail client. Writer has some features that MS Word does not. A particularly useful function is what we call the “mind reader.” Each time you work on a document, Writer takes note of long words you use. It then starts competing words automatically as you type. For a skilled clerk or frequent writer this can seriously improve productivity.
Calc, the spreadsheet application will also read and write Excel formats and also has some unique features such as natural language formulas.
Impress is the OpenOffice presentation package which is compatible with PowerPoint file formats. Better, because of the OpenDocument format, your presentations can be accessed from any compliant software in the world, including of course the other members of the OpenOffice Suite itself.
Draw is the graphics program that includes “smart connectors” making it easy to to create flowcharts, org charts and network diagrams. It can import all common graphic formats such as jpeg, gif, tiff and so on. It also includes Gallery for maintaining clipart collections and can create flash movies.
Base is the database application. Base is an highly flexible, robust tool built on the Structured Query Language (SQL) standard. Base natively supports Microsoft Access, MySQL, Adabas, Dbase and ADO; and any other database that supports ODBC or JDBC. Base can also connect to LDAP address books such as those hosted by Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla.
OpenOffice is suitable for businesses and organizations of all sizes.
Accounting and Financial
A spreadsheet is an archaic tool for doing accounting and financial management of any complexity.
Getting this one right will have long-lasting impacts on your organization so it is worth approaching it with care.
A double-entry accounting program from the Open Source community is GNUCash. This program has a strong developer community, but it is important to keep in mind that such projects do depend on volunteers. Thoroughly test out the program before committing to permanent use in your business.
Another Open Source solution is SQL-Ledger, a fully featured package, including inventory which goes beyond even commercial programs like QuickBooks (pricing from $400 – $1,000+ if you buy the British version). The package has a good reputation as an excellent solution — once it is installed. As an open source free package, SQL-Ledger comes with essentially no documentation. Documentation can purchased as part of a support package ranging in price (at time of writing) from $190 to $900.
It is likely that you can benefit from SQL-Ledger or other alternatives at substantially lower cost than going for one of the majors such SAP which can run to tens of thousands of dollars. But tread with care and ensure you have all your questions answered plus actually have in hand all the questions good advisors can provide.
4. E-mail
5. Collaboration
6. Do Real World Testing
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