The second type of open source is less altruistic and is at the heart of the business model of thousands of sofware development firms, worldwide. Of course, many open source products start as what I first described and become profitable businesses later; like Mozilla (Firefox) or Red Hat (Linux). How does a business make money with free software? There are several channels: (1) support and other services, such as customization (2) premium offerings: Many companies will offer a free version of their product but then also sell a super-charged edition. (3) Licensing technology for use within commercial products. (3) Advertisting, especially if it’s mainstream software that is Internet enabled. Mozilla, makers of Firefox web browser reportedly earns 88% of it’s revenue from Google alone, who paid Mozilla 75 million in 2007 just to be the browser’s default search engine. (4) Donations. Paypal has made it increasingly easy for even weekend hobbiest developers to bring in extra cash for their efforts. As a consumer of technology who is striving to conserve cash during these lean times, you and your business can benefit from the proliferation and maturity of many prominent open source technologies. These are some popular titles that you should evaluate and see how they might fit into your business model.

Desktop Software

Open Office:

Openoffice.org offers users a full Microsoft Office compatible suite with a familiar look and feel, at no cost with no restrictions. The software includes word processing,spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. Open Office stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. That means that you can open Word documents from sources outside of your company with no trouble at all. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

System & Network Security

If you are tired of renewing your anti-virus, anti-spyware subscriptions you should take a look at the following free applications.

Clamwin

ClamWin is a Free Antivirus program for Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003 and Vista.
ClamWin Free Antivirus comes with an easy installer and open source code. You may download and use ClamWin on every machine in your organization without limits. It features:

• High detection rates for viruses and spyware;
• Scanning Scheduler;
• Automatic downloads of regularly updated Virus Database.
• Standalone virus scanner and right-click menu integration to Microsoft Windows Explorer;
• Addin to Microsoft Outlook to remove virus-infected attachments automatically.

Spybot Search and Destroy

Spybot – Search & Destroy detects and removes spyware, a relatively new kind of threat not yet covered by common anti-virus applications. Spyware silently tracks your surfing behaviour to create a marketing profile for you that is transmitted without your knowledge to the compilers and sold to advertising companies. If you see new toolbars in your Internet Explorer that you haven’t intentionally installed, if your browser crashes inexplicably, or if your home page has been “hijacked” (or changed without your knowledge), your computer is most probably infected with spyware. Even if you don’t see the symptoms, your computer may be infected, because more and more spyware is emerging. Spybot-S&D is free, so there’s no harm giving it a try to see if something has invaded your computer.

Accounting

GNUCash

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software. Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports. GNUCash has a graphing module and comes with a full suite of customizable reports.

TurboCash:

TurboCASH is a full blown multi user, multi company program. There are no hidden corners and no paid “Enteprise Versions.” The same installation of TurboCASH works in over 20 languages and in over 50 countries. You can use this program for a business with no accountant up to a business with 50 accountants. This ability to work in so many environments is a major boon for TurboCASH. New releases are available to everyone instantly.

Running Remote Applications

Just recently, Google annouced the release of NeatX an NX server specifically designed for running open source programs (X Windows) over remote desktop connections. Although NeatX was adapted from technology designed primarily to optimize X11 sessions (X Windows), it can be configured as a proxy server to tunnel Remote Desktop Protocol (for Windows Terminal Services sessions) and remoteVirtual Network Computing (VNC) sessions (most modern general-purpose operating system platforms), giving them some of the same speed improvements. Microsoft’s Windows Terminal Services is very costly to license so the release of NeatX will be a boon for businesses ready to adopt Google’s technology. NeatX’s source code is open and is available but packaged installers have not been release yet, as the software NeatX is still heavily under development.

Collaboration: The key to a virtual office strategy:

Digsby

Digsby has to be coolest video, voice, chat applicaition out there. Digsby interfaces with AOL’s Instant Messenger, Windows Messenger, ICQ, Google Chat, and the open source platform, Jabber. Even more it can be integrated with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hot Mail, AOL Mail and any standard POP3 or IMAP email account. Each account adds a little icon to the system tray where you can quickly check your account status. And even more, you can access the basic social networking features of LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Digsby has a chat widget that you can incorporate into a web page, which Ecropolis uses in some places on its site to provide support services and in other places to handle potential sales related questions. Another great thing about Digsby is that it logs your chats so you can always search through old chat snippets.

The next section of this list is all web-based software. Most open source software is designed to run on top of a foundation known as LAMP which means Linux (the OS), Apache (Webserver), MySQL (database), PHP/PERL/Python (scripting engines); these are all well-developed and supported and considered best-of-breed technologies. Most web-hosting companies run on a LAMP environment; which is why your typical web-hosting is so inexpensive. Ecropolis hosting runs on a LAMP environment with a commercial software package on top of it called Plesk, which gives our hosting clients an easy-to-use, very slick GUI interface to manage their accounts with. Users can manage databases, email, upload/edit/delete files and every other aspect imaginable. The Ecropolis LAMP environment can also parse, compile and render Ruby on Rails, JSP and ASP script code. For Ecropolis, Plesk insures its servers are always up-to-date with the latest upgrades and patches; a must with open source software. Incidentally, Ecropolis also maintains a Windows IIS environment capable of executing ASP, .NET, and Coldfusion, which is an application server.

All of the software in the following list can be installed in a couple of clicks from our control panel. I think it’s also important to mention that just because these are web-based applications, if they are for internal use you could very easily turn up a LAMP webserver using any old PC that’s lying around. For ease, I recommend actually departing from the Linux part and going with WAMP, the “W” is for Windows or MAMP on a Mac. There are open source software packages by the same names, WAMP and MAMP that offer intuitive installers that not only install Apache/MySQL and scripting engines, but also give you access to an interface that simplifies the management of the software bundle’s many configuration options. (Let me know if you would like more information on how to best set this up-I’m considering creating a tutorial on it.)

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

The following applications are all available on the Ecropolis hosting platform and can be self installed using our Installation Wizard. Ecropolis can also provide support and services for any of these best-of-breen open source packages.

eGroupWare

eGroupWare is a free enterprise ready groupware software. It provides calendar, knowledgebase, content management system, address book, project management, and inventory tools. It is available in 25 languages.

Brim

Brim is a web-based information manager with support for bookmarks, calendar, contacts, notes, news, passwords and tasks.

Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH):

Crafty Syntax Live Help is a multi-user, multi-operator, multi-department Live Help support chat system.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the same Wiki-software that runs Wikipedia. MediaWiki is a Web-based wiki software application deployed by many organizations as an internal knowledge management solution, and as a content management system. MediaWiki is written in PHP, and can use either the MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system. MediaWiki supports more than 70 languages; it is scalable and customizable.

Moodle

If training is an important part of your operation and you have a curriculum you could install Moodle and build your own ecourses using this elearning package that’s being utilized by institutions world-wide as a robust platform for hosting coursework.

eTicket Support

eTicket Support easy-to-use helpdesk and customer support software that allows you to take control of your company inbox, and productively handle interactions between you and your clients. – a savvy web based helpdesk software solution, with intuitive AJAX based interface and with .less is more. approach. Support Center 1.0 is AJAX, PHP / MySQL helpdesk software for small to mid-sizes businesses. It provides organizations with ability to set up centralized email management and support ticket system for communication with customers. Along with all the important features, easy learning curve and fast and easy to use AJAX interface, it makes addressing customer questions quick and painless.

PHProjekt

PHProjekt is a modular application for the coordination of group activities and sharing information and documents through the Web. PHProjekt provides the following features: group calendar; project management tools; file management; contact manager; e-mail client; built-in HTML editor; Wiki; forum; export of documents to CSV, XLS, Doc, PDF, XML, RTF; synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and PDAs; support for 38 languages; support for protocols like LDAP, XML/SOAP, WebDAV; support for 9 types of databases.

CRM – Customer Relationship Managers

VTiger

VTiger is the best 100% Open Source CRM I have come across. Sales force automation, marketing automation, customer support and service, order management and more. Fully open source with a plugin architecture that has given birth to plugins to communicate with Outlook. You can install a customer portal module, project management module and integrate it with popular shopping cart systems. Some of the add on modules are commercial and do cost.

SugarCRM

Sugar is a commercial product with an open source, community edition that is stripped down and limited as to how many user accounts you can have. Sugar is a great choice if you feel your organization may scale rapidly enough to need enterprise level solutions available in the future. More information is available at www.sugarforge.com

Get Your Blog on!

WordPress

You can install the very same software that drives the WordPress.com website, skin it to match your style, and extend it even further by installing plugins (done by the click of a button) that extend your blog site into just about any direction imaginable; even a shopping cart. The Ecropolis Report is powered by WordPress. The WordPress plugin installer is great; you can search the WordPress plugins database and install them with the click of a button right from your WP control panel. It’s also worthwhile to mention that you can actually use WordPress to power your website. Using WordPress as a CMS for your business website gives you an easy to maintain site, that can be search engine optimized and social network enabled right out of the box. Best of all you can probably do it on your own or with very little help.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A CMS manages the content of your website from text to images and photos and video. All of the CMS software mentioned here offers a great way of launching a turn-key, user-managed website in very little time an at no cost. These CMS packages will make it possible for users within an organization to manage every aspect of the website without having to possess any technical knowledge or skills. They also allow for users and groups to use permission access and management-level security control with every activity leaving an audit trail. However, because every organization is different and there will be differing goals for the website; and for that reason, there is usually some up-front customization of the visual design and information architecture, as well as the functionality; which again, can be customized using available plugins or by having developers develop custom plugins. A few of the strongest benefits across the board are the following:

• Great templates available free and commercial for skinning a site to be visually appealing
• Easily SEO optimized out of the box, an for the long run. (Ecropolis offers SEO services and consulting)
• Extensible into a plethora of functional areas, such as ecommerce.
• Can be used to build community-based websites and provide for a “social networking” platform.

Below are the three best-of-breed open source content management systems. They are all completely free and are supported by a huge community of developers and designers that have made contributions to the core or in the form of numerous plugins that can extend the functionlaity of this systems in every way imaginable. There is also a lot of commercial support for these products in the form of technical support, customization, and commercial (paid) plug-in development.

• Joomla – www.joomla.org
• Drupal – www.drupal.org
• PostNuke – www.postnuke.com

There are thousands of more great software titles available that you can download and install for free. We have a list of free software downloads that you can browse by category and link to the software maker’s website. You can also visit Tucows. com and search for software by keyword. If you find some good discoveries there be sure to come back and post comments so that our readers can benefit from that knowledge. The largest catalog of open source projects, which includes a download repository is Source Forge at www.sourceforge.net. Source Forge is really a platform built for development teams but they have an excellent search and a lot of information available about various projects posted there to help in evaluating software that you think you might use. Be sure before you do choose a software for business use; that it popular, which can be measured by how much it has been downloaded. Also check that it has been updated recently and has been around for a few years. When I’m perusing new software, I stick to those three rules at a minimum and never gone wrong. You should also Google a software title before going too far and just see what else has been written about it.

Again, as you discover great software for small business use. Drop us a comment and share your find. Also, if there are questions or you are interested in how Ecropolis might be able to help, please be sure to let us know.