Top Ten Open Source Tools
With the rising interest and demand for Open Source, together with the plethora of options open to the IT SME (thanks to the multitude of projects within the Open Source community), many questions arise: Where does one start on the information search? Which tool is tried and tested and fit for purpose? Which are compatible with a Windows environment? And so on.
Business owners and individuals often have many questions but little time to find answers. As a result, the search and evaluation process can elude them. The seminar held on 19th July delivered clarity and an impartial perspective, helping the attendees cut through some of these difficulties.
A mixed audience attended
From those 'new' to open source, to the 'familiar and curious', to those with 'significant knowledge' of open source software. All recognise how Open Source is transforming the IT landscape, and realise how crucial it is for their business to keep on top of 'best of breed' tools to help them embrace new opportunities.
Feedback showed an appreciation of the information and demonstrations, which gave insights into developer tools for improving and streamlining the development process.
Preparation of the content
Delivered by Paul and Elliot of OpenAdvantage, it was an
ambitious task, if only because of the vast range of powerful,
sophisticated and innovative tools which could have been included;
most likely food for thought for the next seminar! They settled on
ten of the most generically useful for IT companies (and cheated in
some categories by including more than one product).
Here's the full top ten run down:
10.
Windows utilities: 7-zip, PuTTY (SSH client), Filezilla (FTP client),
PDF Creator, SciTE (text editor)
9. Thunderbird email client
8.
CRM: SugarCRM and EGS
7.
Trac and Subversion
6. Custom Linux (SmoothWall, IPCop,
OpenFiler)
5.
EasyEclipse
4.
OpenOffice.org
3. XAMPP
2.
Open source CMS: Drupal, Plone, and Joomla!
1. Firefox
Oracle
Our guest speaker from Oracle explained the corporation's support of Open Source, describing their SME solutions running on Linux.
UKita
Completing the morning's events was a presentation by UKita explaining the benefits of being a member of the UK IT association.
The Future
No one knows what the future holds, yet it is exciting and Open Source software will clearly be a significant part of it.
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