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Top 10 Open Source Applications for SMEs

It often comes as a shock to Windows and Mac users when they learn that the vast majority of common applications, even complex commercial software such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office, have free, open source alternatives.

We've put together a collection of ten free, open source applications that potentially save your business hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds.

1. OpenOffice
   Alternative to: Microsoft Office
   OpenOffice is a feature-packed alternative to Microsoft Office. The primary applications of OpenOffice are Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheet) and Impress (presentations).
   
   Capable of opening the saving Microsoft formats like .doc and .xls, OpenOffice offers everything you'll need to write letters, build complex spreadsheets and create impressive slideshows. It looks and works like Microsoft Office and because it's free, it'll save you about £119 - the cost of Microsoft Office 2007.
   
   

   Sirius rating: no-brainer
   Available on: Windows and Linux
   Download: www.openoffice.org



2. Firefox
   Alternative to: Internet Explorer
   With over 400 million downloads and counting, the Firefox Web browser has won almost 15 per cent of the global browser market as of October 2007, translating to roughly 110 million global users. Firefox is the most secure web browser available with thousands of extensions to add useful functionality like tabbed browsing. If you're not using it already, you're missing out.
   
   

   Sirius rating: no-brainer
   Available on: Windows, Mac and Linux
   Download: www.mozilla.com/firefox



3. SugerCRM Community Edition
   Alternative to: Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce
   SugarCRM's free community version is a fully functional customer relationship management system that allows you to easily access front office (e.g. face to face meetings, phone calls, e-mail, online services) and back office (e.g. billing, maintenance, planning, marketing, advertising, finance, manufacturing) information and analyse critical business data (e.g. market share, number and types of customers, revenue, profitability). Sirius has been running SugarCRM for 4 years and couldn't live without it.
   
   

   Sirius rating: no-brainer
   Available on: Windows, Mac and Linux
   Download: www.sugarcrm.com
   



4. GNUCash
   Alternative to: Quicken
   GnuCash is a free personal and small-business financial-accounting software that 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.
   
   

   Sirius rating: a no-brainer small businesses
   Available on: Windows and Linux
   Download: www.gnucash.org



5. Drupal or Joomla!
   Alternative to: Windows SharePoint
   There are some many ridiculously priced commercial web content management systems (CMS) around. A quick look at Wikipedia (http://tinyurl.com/hoqbu) shows that there's even one which starts at $15,000. But for most businesses this sort of money doesn't deliver anything more than that can be provided by an open source CMS like Drupal or Joomla!.
   
   Both are incredibly sophisticated and benefit from extremely active development communities around them that will rapidly fix bugs and respond to your feature requests. Like any CMS the learning curve can be pretty steep but when your potentially saving thousands of pounds, the investment in time is really worth it.
   
   

   Sirius rating: a no-brainer but may require you to buy-in technical help
   Available on: Windows, Mac and Linux
   Download Drupal: www.drupal.org
   Download Joomla!: www.joomla.org



6. GIMP
   Alternative to: Adobe Photoshop
   Many people download illegal copies of Adobe Photoshop purely for cropping and resizing photos. GIMP takes care of this task without the risk of lawsuits. It's been around for a decade and is compatible with most of the commonly used image formats such as JPG, TIFF, PNG, BMP and GIF, as well as most Adobe Photoshop and PaintShop Pro files.
   
   There's no need to spend +£500 on Photoshop if all you're doing is resizing images, applying fancy effects and cropping photos, because GIMP is extremely capable at these tasks. Although the layout is different from Adobe PhotoShop, once you've had some practice it's very easy to use and quickly proves itself to be a capable image editor.
   
   

   Sirius rating: perfect for the majority of users but professionals will want to keep Adobe PhotoShop
   Available on: Windows, Linux, and Mac
   Download: www.gimp.org
   



7. Inkscape
   Alternative to: Abode Illustrator
   Inkscape is a free vector graphics editor that lets you create graphics that can be scaled to any size without losing quality. It's great for designing logos, brochures, banners and whatever media has to be scaled of modified in vector mode. Although not as feature-rich as Adobe Illustrator, Inkscape will save you about £700.
   
   

   Sirius rating: perfect for graphic design on a budget
   Available on: Windows, Linux and Mac
   Download: www.inkscape.org
   



8. KDE4
   Alternative to: Windows Vista
   Windows Vista's incompatibility with hardware, its obsessive requirement of human interaction to clear security dialogue box warnings and its abusive use of DRM are just some examples of why this expensive operating system is not business-ready.
   
   So, if you're deciding whether or not to 'upgrade' from XP to Vista consider for a minute the latest version of the free, open source desktop environment - KDE4.
   
   Sporting eye candy to die for, KDE4 is fast, full of great free software and runs on Mac and Windows.
   
   

   Sirius rating: a must for early adopters
   Download Linux with KDE4: www.kubuntu.org or www.opensuse.org
   Download KDE4 applications for Windows: http://windows.kde.org
   Download KDE4 applications for Mac: http://mac.kde.org
   



9. Linux running Samba
   Alternative to: Windows Server 2000+
   Samba is an open source, free software implementation of a suite of protocols that provide seamless file and print services to any Windows system. In plain English that means that Samba lets Windows PCs use non-Windows file and print servers as if they were Windows servers. By using a combination of a Linux server with Samba file sharing software, you can achieve all the desired functionality of a Windows server without the license fees and feature bloat.
   
   

   Sirius rating: requires some expertise to install and configure but will save you thousands in licensing fees.
   Available on: Mac and Linux
   Download: www.kubuntu.org or www.opensuse.org or www.debian.org or www.fedoralinux.org
   



10. Kolab Groupware
    Alternative to: Microsoft Exchange or Novell Groupwise
    Email and group calendaring (groupware) is critical to any business no matter how small. MS Exchange server is the market leader but suffers from security vulnerabilities and, of course, high pricing. A leading open source alternative is Kolab.
    
    Kolab's feature-rich web interface and Microsoft Outlook compatibility means that its increasingly a shoe-in for expensive proprietary groupware suites.
    
    

    Sirius rating: establishing an excellent reputation but will likely require you to hire in some deployment and SI expertise.
    Available on: Linux
    Download: www.kolab.org
    

For more information about open source software and how it can be used in your business visit http://www.siriusit.co.uk/open-directory.html

About the author
This article was written by Mark Taylor. Mark is the CEO of Sirius, the founder and past President of the Open Source Consortium, and an authoritative writer and speaker on all aspects of the Open Source phenomenon. He has been instrumental in some of the largest Open Source deployments in the UK, working with household names in both Private and Public sectors. Flagship clients include Linklaters, BOC, Sony Ericsson, Pentax and Specsavers, the latest UK giant committing to migrate all the way to Free Software.

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