Is Business Software really out of reach for a Small Business?
Not anymore. What is it that a business needs, if it's made of let's say 3-5 people with one office (plus 3-5 home offices), some assets and a big desire to succeed?
Webmail
A synchronized calendar
A Website
Some sort of CRM system
It’s fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
A sales automation tool would be cool
A project management software (although they don't know it yet)
Somewhere to store documents - like a Document Manager
And ultimately - an ERP programme
These could total an investment that ranges into millions of dollars/euros. That is obviously too much for a starting business, so let's go a bit lower. How low? Well, how about down to zero? The reality is that all (not most, but all) of these types of programs in software areas that used to be dominated by monopolists, are freely available today. Think open source.
So, What Is Open Source?
Feminism, like Boston, is a state of mind. It is the state of mind of women who realize that their whole position in the social order is antiquated, as a woman cooking over an open fire with heavy iron pots would know that her entire housekeeping was out of date.
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
Open source stands for open standards in the development of code that runs for software. For developers that means they can freely edit the code in a way they feel, or the bigger group feels, is pragmatic. For the common user, it means that software is free. And not only that, it also means the software was developed by a large group of people instead of a single corporation, and is being improved constantly. Linus' law, considered the law of open source, states that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The more developers, and the more room for them to improve constantly, the less bugs we encounter.
And open source is gaining popularity. Talking of software that a business needs, we could take Joomla for example. It is an open source content management software for websites that has been downloaded a stunning 15 million times. Together with Drupal, another open-source CMS, they run a large percentage of the websites in the world, including visually very stunning, but also many important websites. Corporations and organisations for whom software is critical to be top level, are turning to open source.
The same is with other types of software. The collaboration and productivity tool eGroupware has received over 2 million downloads from sourceforge.net. What is more exemplary of support for the software is the 94% approval ranking. Document Management software Alfresco has reseived over 1.7 million downloads. It's approval rating is lower mostly because it is hard to implement out-of-the-box. In reality there is no box. But there are plenty of fixes that make it run smoothly, as we have done in our product. After tweaking, it is one of the best document management softwares out there. A browse through Alfresco's customer line-up reveals names like VirginMobile, FedEx and KLM, which are big players.
Smart Lazy
There are plenty of arguments that attest to the smartness of using open source, and they will be covered in future posts, but for a small business it takes some time to roll out all of that excellent open source software and make it work to benefit the company. What a small business needs is something useful, but it needs to be useful now! A smart way to be lazy, so to speak. And those are some of the reasons we thought about deploying this package of integrated open source business software. After some hard work, we might have succeeded. I hope you gained some extra insights after reading this article, and I will finish off with a short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4XhF7yxtZQ
Siim Esko, 24, is part of the.