The economy is requiring small and large businesses alike to tighten their belts and be a bit more frugal towards their spending. It becomes more and more difficult to justify buying that upgrade for Office, do we really need a new server, we can't afford a lot of frills with our web apps. I felt it necessary to share some of the tools that I use. TOPSweb is my side business and I don't just throw money away on it now that we are a single income family with 2 very young children. I have to not just make every dollar count, I make every penny count. That said, I have Enterprise level tools that I run the business with that rival large corporations' tools.
I got on a really tight IT budget about four years ago when I spent all I had on a new/used Alienware on ebay. It was the most awesome laptop I've ever owned. I bought all of the web design tools I needed and I was ready to go full bore and totally mobile. Then after about 6 months the processor over-heated and that was the end of that. I was screwed. I had my everything on that computer and now it was gone. I dug out an old IBM laptop off the shelf and dusted it off. It had a Pentium III Celeron in it. I was not a happy camper to say the least.
I decided to go to Linux and I tried Linspire for a while and really liked it. I then found Ubuntu which I still use today. So why the long prologue...
After beginning to use Linux for a while I started understanding that Microsoft in many ways was a pusher to a bit of a software addiction that I had acquired without realizing. It was something of an enlightenment that I still carry today. I began searching out open source solutions for alternatives that I had been paying quite dearly for in the past. The result was in my amazement of how the open source community had been blossoming. The entire concept of people donating time to a project with the common purpose of fulfilling that software's need. This was real R&D at it's finest. It's not a salesman pushing an idea to leverage more sales. These projects were being built for the end-user because everyone there were the end users.
So here are my top picks for businesses and apps you should know about.
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SugarOS CRM - If you haven't used a Customer Relationship Management software before you are not serious about your business. I can't put it any other way. The power this tool puts into your hands and the ability to keep you organized around your Sales and Marketing ventures is priceless. You are not looking at Monthly financial anymore to determine where you should steer your business to be more productive. You have real-time pipeline analysis in your face by the second. You make a change you can see how it affects things.
Sugar CRM has a very clever and unique method to their R&D. They allow you to use and install the Open Source version for free. Then if your business grows you can upgrade to the an enterprise edition for a nominal fee. What they get out of it is essentially a ton of free R&D by users rating the software, doing development on it which then gets carried over into the paid service. I used Salesforce.com for a couple of years and as far as the basis CRM features the free SugarOS is probably better in my opinion. This says a lot because I still think Salesforce.com is a fantastic product/service. -
DotProject – This is a project management software that works solely as a web app. I use it exclusively for all TOPSweb projects. It has some built in functionality that has something of a stopwatch feature that for recording time on tasks (can be overridden). You can create an invoice right from the task logs for your customers. There is also a newer version where one of the developers has gone off on his own to do a web 2.0 version of this called web2project built on the same framework.. I haven't personally used it yet, but it looks amazing and I hope to give it a test drive soon.
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JOOMLA! CMS – Joomla is a content management system that you can build and maintain your website through an administrative console web interface. It has millions of templates available from various websites. The beauty of this web application is that you don't have to call a web developer every time you want to post to your site. You don't have to know html or css, to use it.
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Mozilla Firefox w/ extensions – If all you've ever used is Internet Explorer then you are in for a very rude awakening. I don't care what you do, there are extensions for this browser that will make you more productive. Here are the one's I can't live without:
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Imacros – Doing something repetitive on the web, record your clicks and then just hit play to do it again and again and again.
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Web Developer – This extension is the best. You can change a css file on a site on the fly to see what it will change. Remove photos, locate positioning.
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Firebug – my second best friend on web developmeent.
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GTDinbox – Inspired by David Allen's “Getting Things Done”, this extension adds functionality to Gmail.
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Gmail – Even if you don't like the tag and drop it in the pit (archive) and conversation grouping of gmail, which I love, you want to at least understand the abilities it has of interfacing a pop mail server and then acting as a intermediary mail server to your email client like Outlook or Thunderbird. As a webmaster to a ton of sites, I have the webmaster address all going to one gmail account. When I reply, it replies as if I had a specific account. I also have Evolution (Ubuntu's email) hooked into Gmail so I get all of those emails copied to my laptop for offline reading when necessary.
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Google Docs and Spreadsheets – I use it more as a repository than anything else. I find writing directly in it to be a little clunky still. What I love about this is that I can do online collaboration very easily. Not to mention, you have an amazing search capability that has more uses than anything you can imagine.
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Freemind – This one of my lates finds that Ihad to trow in here. It isn't a web app, but it deserves recognition as a wonderful productivity tool. It is mind mapping tool that is open source. In all honesty it is the only mind-mapping tool I've ever used, so I can't compare it to anything else. I've been doing a lot of documentation writing lately and I've been able to create amazing outlines from a mind dump in seconds.
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GIMP – Why pay the ridiculous price for Adobe Photoshop when this program does it all for free. This is no toy, it rules!
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Linux Ubuntu – Trust me it has everything you could ever need and then an unimaginable amount more. I am constantly impressed and I've been using it for 4 years. The only thing that makes me love it more is when I use Vista, I then appreciate it twice as much. It's stable, it's super fast, it has eye candy that makes Vista look like Windows 95. Did I mention it's stable. The fact is I don't care if you run it on a Pentium III or a dual core Athlon it just simply rocks! You'll get twice the longevity out of your hardware and for no cost.
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OpenOffice – Let me first say it's not better than Microsoft Office. It's the only one that I'll say that it isn't. I am a bit biased as for the fact that I personally think that the 2 best softwares ever invented are MS Excel and MS Outlook. All things considered I think Microsoft does a fantastic job on those more than anything else. However, openoffice is close, it's real close. OpenOffice opens all MS Office files, even 2007 versions. It's easy to use and if you were to weight a decision based on price to features, OpenOffice wins hands down. Everything I do on TOPSweb from an Office tool is done using OpenOffice. Every memo, spreadsheet, presentation, etc. It only makes good business sense.
I hope you can make good use of some of these if not all. TOPSweb can assist your business with installation of any of these services. Feel free to call us at 770 884 1343 or email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. '; document.write(''); document.write(addy_text56648); document.write('<\/a>'); //-->\n This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .