Software and IT costs for any small business can soon mount up especially with so many providers charging on a user by user basis. Although not as well-known as the large software providers, there are dozens of open source or freeware alternatives waiting to help you with your business software requirements. The added bonus is they won’t charge you or your business a penny!
Email & instant messaging
Always being connected and contactable doesn’t have to cost you any money as a business. Google’s email services are widely considered to be amongst the best available and allow users to access their emails on multiple devices plus includes features such as real time collaboration and built in instant messaging. Obviously an email address such as “[email protected]” doesn’t portray you as a professional company or maintain a consistent brand. However, you can use your own domain name’s email addresses as well with Gmail. This “How to Use Gmail With Your Own Branded Domain” guide takes you through the necessary steps to set this up.
You can also use the likes of Talk, Calendar and Docs through “Google Apps”. To setup Google Apps for one of your domain names login to our control panel, click “Manage Domain Names”, select the domain you wish to update and then click “DNS Management”. On this page there is a new section called “Setting DNS for Google Apps”. Click the link in this section and all the settings will be made automatically for you.
Documents, spread sheets and presentations
Save on licensing fees by looking beyond Microsoft office. Open Office is a fully formed and professional suite of software, and they are all great alternatives to Microsoft’s products. The Open Office suite includes a word processor, spread sheet software, presentation software and database software. If you are worried about compatibility with other companies who use Microsoft, you can also open and save files in Microsoft’s file formats e.g. Word’s .doc.
Ecommerce & billing
In their own words “osCommerce Online Merchant is an Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free with a feature rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, fees, or limitations involved.” [Available as a one click install for Home Pro, Business Pro & Reseller Pro customers]
No business can survive if clients aren’t paying on time, so to help chase those bills and keep records of payments use Simple Invoices, a free and open source invoicing system packed full of some great features.
Customer support
Whether it is by phone, email or web forms, If you offer customer support services to your customers you can use OSticket to maintain a centralised record of your customer contacts without having to pay a software supplier any monthly usage fees. [Available as a one click install for Home Pro, Business Pro & Reseller Pro customers]
Project management
As your business grows, managing all of your on-going projects can become increasingly difficult and inefficient. Rather than adapting your CMS software or using a spread sheet, to keep up to date you can use dotProject. dotProject is purpose built project management software and completely free. [Available as a one click install for Home Pro, Business Pro & Reseller Pro customers]
Web design & graphics
If you like to dabble with web design or add content to your site, you don’t have to buy the likes of Dreamweaver to do this. Aptana Studio is a HTML and CSS design suite also used by programmers who write in PHP, Ruby and others. You can also save on Photoshop licenses by using the likes of GIMP and Inkscape to draw and edit images.
Actually Open Office is no more (its still available, but there wont be anymore updates, accroding to Sun/Oracle).
https://www.smoothblog.co.uk/2011/04/20/openofficeorg-discontinued-libreoffice-takes/
LibreOffice which is made by the same developers that were sacked at Open Office is basically the continued product.
David,
I didn’t know that, thanks for the heads up and the link to LibreOffice. I’m going to have a nosey around that this afternoon.
Matt
The venerable old osCommerce has served us well for several years now – but unless the recently released very long-awaited v3 quickly gets updated to a usable system, I wouldn’t recommend it. The technology is creaking at the seams, and contributions are incorporated into your shop by hacking, i.e. the instructions have you find lines of code and replace them or insert other code after them. This can get very hairy, especially if you have installed many other contributions. There are several other free software alternatives, we’re currently evaluating to upgrade our store (CuriousMinds.co, onto Heart from our current server in the USA). But I will say that OSC got much right, especially the db structure (according to my wife, our db guru), and so far we haven’t found another that pleases us – except possibly Zen Cart, an OSC fork.
Pleasure Matt 🙂
I prefer for:
Ecommerce & Billing: Joomla with VirtueMart or Magento.
Joomla is available with 1 click via HI hosting and Magento I hope that will be available soon via HI 1 click install.
Thanks.
OpenCart (https://www.opencart.com/) is infinitely better than osCommerce. Someone should put osCommerce out of its misery.
Yep, OpenCart is very powerful, easy, advanced and well coded script of all free scripts. Also I think that it will have a famous future!
Heart Internet must include it in the “1 click” install scripts in web hosting packets. Can you do that HI?
In my opinion, and from what other far superior shopping carts are available today, osCommerce needs putting to bed. It’s downright ugly admin area and the amount of wasted time getting certain things to work just is so old hat. I refuse point blank to accept work from people who want me to sort out their ecommerce site if it’s based on osCommerce.
Having read about SimpleInvoices from this blog post I decided to check it out. more out of curiosity than anything else. No way will it work, after going through every step as instructed, all there is on the index.php page is a blank white page and no source code at all. Over the last 3 days I have read all the support posts on SimpleInvoices forum and no way José will it work. I have also tried it on a mates hosting (washes mouth out after this – UK2) and exactly the same. All other scripts work fine on all HI accounts.
Time is money so it’s been dumped in file 13, the bin.
Have you ever tried Excalibur Office from SSuite Office?
Most of their software is also available separately for download, which makes it most convenient. 😀
Contains almost everything you need for the office.
It is interesting to see what software is being used by other people. However, I cannot believe that Prestshop has not been mentioned. Prestashop has been my e-commerce preference for a while now.
osCommerce has problems, as mentioned by others. Magento is a code grinder that is only viable on a dedicated server, and some people are also critical of the attitude of the OpenCart developer towards accepting security patches (not ideal for e-commence software).
Google apps is indeed very good, but if you are not keen on google owning you data, a zimbra server with the zimbra desktop client should be considered, although it may be difficult for some businesses to deploy, if they do not have a bit of Linux knowledge available to them.
Lastly, there isn’t a light and fast editor (free or otherwise) that can compete notepad++, in my humble opinion.
Thanks to Hayley & Chris for the OC recommendation, I’ve now moved Curious Minds & our other stores to it and am very satisfied! These stores are currently still hosted on our US servers, didn’t want to change too much at once & it seemed wisest to do such a big move in a familiar environment. Soon as the dust settles we hope to move’em to HI.
Heart: I second Chris’s suggestion to add OC to 1 click. I don’t especially need it for myself, I can install it by myself, but OC is vastly superior to OSC, as several others have have said here. Oh, I noticed that the OC db is almost exactly a copy of OSC’s (with some minor name changes and other small changes) so it was very easy to move our db over. Anybody now using OSC looking to upgrade to a modern system would do well to check it out!
“…OC is vastly superior to OSC, as several others have have said here” I meant to say, OC is vastly superior to OSC, several others have remarked on how bad OSC is now…
From an e-commerce point of view.. have you come across http://www.ecwid.com?I think it’s an excellent bit of software, especially as it’s free.I have a few clients running with it and they love it.