Open source software alternatives for small businesses
Charmagne Munoz Feria
Small businesses are often tight on cash.
When times are rough, the first thing that small business owners do is to rethink its spending. One expense item that would probably catch their attention is the spending on software licensing and upgrades – money that could have been spent on more important investments like employee trainings, facility improvements , or marketing.
Your business will benefit from substituting free, open-source applications for those expensive software.
Here are some suggested open source software substitutes for commonly used proprietary software:
1) Open Office.org for Microsoft Office
OpenOffice.org is a free, open-source office suite which is a good substitute for MS Office. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet , equation editor, visual database, presentation and drawing application.
But just because it costs nothing, it does not mean that Open Office.org is an inferior product. It has many of the features of MS Word . In fact, some users claim that OpenOffice.org Writer (word processor) actually bests MS Word in a number of areas, including page layout, lists, headers, footers and endnotes.
Even if your current files are in MS Word format (.doc), you can open these files with OpenOffice.org and have the option of saving them as .doc or as .odt, the OpenOffice.org word processing document format.
2) Firefox for Internet Explorer
Firefox web browser is an extremely popular alternative to Internet Explorer. One Firefox feature that users will appreciate is " tabbed browsing", which lets you open multiple pages within a single browser window using tabs . Thus you do not have to open several windows to access several webpages at the same time.
3) Mozilla Thunderbird for Microsoft Outlook
Mozilla Thunderbird is a full-featured messaging client that works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It provides support for POP and IMAP e-mail, NNTP newsgroups, and RSS feeds. You can add calendaring features with the Lightning extension, which you can share through WebDAV servers. It is also compatible with Apple iCal. However, it does not communicate with Exchange servers for access to Outlook calendars.
4) GIMP for Adobe Photoshop
Undoubtedly, Adobe Photoshop is a superior product that is the de facto standard for image editing software. If your business relies hugely on image editing , there’s no better alternative than Photoshop.
However, if your business will survive without the power of Photoshop, a free yet high quality alternative is GIMP ("GNU Image Manipulation Program") , which boasts of similar capabilities and tools.
5) Amanda for Windows’ built-in data backup tools
You can use more sophisticated free and open source solutions like Amanda (Advanced Maryland Automated Network Disk Archiver) Open Source Backup software.
It has the capability to protect servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS-X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Amanda supports common tape drives and other backup devices .
6) UltraVNC for Microsoft’s Remote Desktop
Not all Windows licenses include the Remote desktop server even if it includes the client terminal.
UltraVNC is an open source remote desktop client and server application for the Microsoft Windows operating system that uses the VNC protocol to control another computer’s screen remotely.
email: openofficetips@feria.name
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