Are you looking for innovative ways to increase your ROI, your bottom line and downright save a ton of money on your IT costs? Let me answer that for you! Of course you are, you would not be a savvy business owner if you did not seek out ways to stretch your money. Drum roll please, introducing Open Source technology a new way for small businesses to even the playing field with their enterprise and big boy competitors.

    Why is this important? You now have access to the same or comparable solutions that normally costs hundreds if not thousands to implement and deploy. Case in point, the Open Source version of SugarCRM, which is a Customer Relationship Management tool can be had for free while one of its proprietary and commercial competitors Salesforce.com cost about $1,000 to start per year for a five user license. Another quick example has Ubuntu, which is a full-featured Linux based operating system against Microsoft XP. XP Professional edition costs $299.99, while Ubuntu costs nothing and comes freely loaded with Office utilities that rival Microsoft’s Office software suite. You do the math. Remember to include per user and or per pc price and upgrades. Yeah, I know, you have been suckered for a long time and we didn’t even mention the server operating system and licenses. Ask yourself, why am I paying for something when I can get it done for little or no cost?

 

    Using Open Source is like using “guerrilla tactics” for your small business IT needs. Does free mean cheap? Let’s take a look. Open Source software affords the user to have software developed by hundreds of developers instead of just a few. Most of the Open Source solutions mentioned here are tried and tested solutions. Did you know that you already use Open Source? Yep, in fact if you use a web browser or use email your using opens source software. The Internet is built upon open standards and runs on Open Source software. Who currently uses Open Source software? IBM, HP, Oracle, whole governments, Google, Yahoo and Amazon just to name a few. 

 

     So you might be asking yourself, what exactly is Open Source? Open Source software in its simplest form is software that freely distributes the source code along with the object code (the actual program that you install and use), so that any programmer familiar with the language can tweak, improve, modify or customize it without needing to ask anyone for permission or wait for a vendor to do it for them. For a more verbose definition, please visit www.opensource.org. The bottom line is, this model of software distribution can give you a freedom and a savings that compels you to at least become a bit more knowledgeable to its uses.

     

     These are some useful links to help get you started on the Open Source road.

www.opensourceweekly.com (for the latest is Open Source technology for small business owners)

www.sourceforge.net (the world`s largest Open Source software development web site)

www.freshmeat.org (Open Source software repository site)

www.theopencd.org (a collection of high quality Free and Open Source Software.)

www.ttcsweb.org/osswin-cd/ (a collection of over 100 free/Open Source software for home and business.)

www.itservants.com (Open Source Technology Consultants)

 

Top Open Source Applications for your small business needs.

www.openoffice.org (Great alternate to the Microsoft office suite.)

www.firefox.com (Open Source web browser, great alternative to Internet Explorer)

www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird (Thunderbird email application, similar to Outlook)

www.tightvnc.com (for remote connection to your computers)

www.mysql.com (The worlds most popular Open Source database)

www.phpmyadmin.com (database management tool)

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net (Filezilla- ftp application to upload and download your web content)

www.joomla.org  (Website Content Management System or CMS)

www.mamboserver.com (Website Content Management System or CMS)

www.apache.org (Very popular Web server application)

www.oscommerce.com (online shop/ e-commerce solution)

www.sugarcrm.com (the CRM tool mentioned in this article)

www.dotproject.net (project management web application)

www.gimp.org (Image manipulation program)

www.nvu.com (complete Web Authoring System)

www.gnucash.org (personal and small-business financial-accounting software.)

www.subversion.tigris.org (Subversion- Document management and revision control system)

www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php (WebCalendar- Online calendar program for single or multiple users)

www.openvpn.net (full-featured SSL VPN solution)

 

Desktop Linux Distributions

www.ubuntu.com Ubuntu
www.redhat.com Redhat
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki Fedora
www.novell.com/linux Suse
http://en.opensuse.org OpenSuse
www.slackware.com Slackware

 

      You can also get the server versions to take care of your business client/server needs such as Email, file, print, FTP, Web, Database, Domain, Authentication etc., There are many distributions of Linux available please check www.distrowatch.com for additional resources.

 

       This list is not at all exhausting and not meant to be. This should serve as a starting place on your journey into the Open Source realm. For general questions feel free to < ="" ="text/"> email< ="" ="text/"> This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it < ="" ="text/"> me, if you have specific questions about any software listed here try posting to the respective forums. A good book to read is Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems, written by John Locke. My definition of Open Source was found in this book.

 

      What have we learned? Before you plunder hundreds of your hard earned or borrowed money into software seek out or find someone who is versed in this technology. Research and evaluate if an Open Source solution can fit your needs. Remember, Open Source Saves! I also find many good feeds about opensource at www.opensourceweekly.com

Let me know if this helped in any way, also  list your favorite open source software.

Thank you for this post.  Our company thrives on creating an IT advantage through opensource.  We run our web applications on Linux Servers and they are rock solid.  Open source is the only way we can stay competitive in today`s market

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Chris Smith
chris.smith at procertify.com

I agree 100% that there are many great open source solutions that would be beneficial to many small businesses. We have built our commercial online CRM product on the LAMP stack and use Firefox, Mozilla, and every other free Open Source solution we can find to build our product and operate our business.

However, I think it is worth clarifying a few key points that were omitted from the original post by blessrdameek:

The post assumes that the reader has an IT department or an IT budget. Most small business people have neither. We happen to be a technology company, so managing the Open Source solutions we use is in our nature.

The post assumes that the reader is interested in and capable of cobbling together multiple technologies into a cohesive IT strategy. Most small business people are not technologist, let alone programmers, who have time for `tweaking` source code. After you add up the cost of the time required to implement and integrate multiple Open Source technologies, the end result could easily end up being far more expensive than if you would have started with a commercially supported product. Many Open Source products are not supported by a vendor, so if you `tweak` it, and you mess it up, you`re in big trouble. On the other hand, vendor supported products almost always come with some sort of support.

Many of our customers have come to us after trying the Open Source version of SugarCRM. The most common complaint is that it has a lot of bugs. Just because there are lots of programmers who contribute to the product, doesn`t mean they are all good at what they do. Free, but poorly written code is not an advantage.

I`m not arguing against Open Source, I think it is a great movement. All I`m saying is that unless you are an IT person, or are using one of the many non-technical solutions like Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird, getting involved in Open Source is something that should be left to the experts.

Good reply, I would also agree with you in regards to the amount of expertise needed to probably implement some of the more technical pieces, but at the same time I think if there was some sort of investment in their IT infrastructure they would still save plenty over time just on licensing alone. Interestingly enough, some small business internal guru`s like to play with the newer technologies, but again the point would be to gain a trusted advisor such as an outside consultant to help with the implementatiion

True,

But my advise for small biz/start-ups to have a commercial applications for single reason (support) as they mostly can not afford IT.

For e.g. they can use SaaS (software as a service) from those software providers that apply usage charge&pricing so they pay only for their use of that software it is cost effective.

Anthony

RTLogix

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Anthony KN
Kyliptix Solutions Inc.

http://www.kyliptix.com

"Many of our customers have come to us after trying the Open Source version of SugarCRM."

We like open source at my company, but that doesn`t mean every piece of open source software is a bargain.  We started with the free version of SugarCRM, bought into the story, and ended up paying thousands of dollars in consulting fees to try and make it work.  In the end we lost much more lost productivity, and even Sugar`s own consultants couldn`t make the software work as advertised.

This "free" software cost my company a huge amount of money in lost customers and the salaries of our employees and they struggled to make it work.

Michael Czeiszperger
Web Performance, Inc.

  Interesting, that seems unfortunate. I hope that doesn`t turn you from utilizing open source in other implementations. Hopefully your level of expectation can be better managed and met.
  Question.?... If you find that something is not working, how much do you keep feeding it?
  Open Source is an alternative that should be explored, but still one should proceed with caution and properly assess if something will fit before putting the weight of their infrastructure on a solutions that cannot be all things to all people.