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Did you know you can run your entire business on free software? Oh yes indeed you can. And one of the key tools you can use to achieve global market domination is CRM, and here is one of the premier tools: Sugar CRM.

Sugar CRM is pretty much a pure customer relationship management suite, and so covers quotations, projects, document storage and customer interactions. It’s a robust, reliable suite that is used by quite a few big customers – like Coca Cola, AVIS, the insurance company AA and even the government of the State of Oregon.

One of the comforts of using it – for an organisation – is the dual licensing and paid support. Not only does this give you access to additional functionality that is not available under the GPL, but also allows you access to support technicians, and the usual helpdesk benefits associated with doing business on a commercial level. And of course, with the system being open source, not only is it easier to support internally (because your technicians can see what it going on), the product would also survive a collapse of the parent company because the source code is availble – something that is often written into corporate contracts requiring expensive escrow source code deposit services.

Sugar CRM has an open source, community edition, as well as a paid support and full commercial support option. It works on a variety of databases, so if you’re a MySQL or a SQL Server house, you’re covered. Which will keep the support people happy, no doubt.

Forgive us for featuring another office program so soon, but AbiWord wouldn’t wait. You see, with my regular computer in for repair, I’ve been using one with less than 4 gigabytes of memory. Half a one, to be precise. And Libre Office, lovely though it is, chews through memory like there’s no tomorrow. There had to be something smaller. And something that opened all my OpenDocument documents as well…

Well not only does AbiWord consume a mere 20MB of memory with a document loaded, it’s fast, small, and even opens Word 2007 documents as well (oh, and WordPerfect ones, ClarisWorks ones, ApplixWorks ones…)

One of the joys of AbiWord is that is is fast. And I really do mean lightning fast – it puts larger lumbering programs such as Word in the shade. And while the support’s not all it could be (tables frequently fail to open from Open Office documents, for example), AbiWord is more than capable of coping with the day to day word processing demands, and should be especially useful for those running XP or Windows 7 based netbooks…

Gnumeric is the spreadsheet component of GNOME Office. It’s a lightweight spreadsheet application that supports all the familiar functions, calculation modes and charts as seen in most spreadsheet applications. …read more »

If you find the traditional look and feel of LibreOffice (aka OpenOffice) to be a bit old-fashioned, or perhaps you only use its core word processor, presentation and spreadsheet components and want a more integrated “feel” to the suite? Or even perhaps you’re considering making the move to free/open office suites, but management still want the backing of a major organisation behind the software? Then perhaps it’s worth considering IBM Lotus Symphony.

Symphony is essentially a cut down version of Libre Office, with the usual plugin handling abilities present, as well as the three core modules. However Symphony’s user interface has been greatly customised using Eclipse, and is designed to present all your documents in tabs in a single interface. While this declutters the Windows taskbar, and for those used to suites such as Microsoft Works, simplifies everything a great deal, for the power user this might present a problem.

However for the road warrior who needs to work with Microsoft Office formatted documents, and to work on their own documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Symphony’s integrated approach bears thought. The large gallery of free clip art and document, spreadsheet and presentation templates available on the Symphone website makes the mouth water as well.

The choice between the two offerings is simple – if you need the database, the math module or the drawing module, you’ll need Libre Office. If, however, you simply work on corporate documents (and even export them as PDF, or digitally sign them), and you really feel that you need your main office suite to be underwritten by a major corporation, then you might consider that Symphony is for you. Libre Office, after all, is still in beta, while Symphony is always based on the latest stable release of Open Office. This does mean some of the newer features may not be available – but if you care enough to be running the stable rather than development version of Libre Office, you wouldn’t be getting those functions anyway.

Personally, I keep both installed. Libre Office is incredibly stable, but I like Symphony’s user interface. And with Libre installed, I still get the modules Symphony doesn’t provide. It’s all good. Please note that to download you’ll need to have either an IBM ID (which is free to register), or provide your name, email address and country to download.

Note: we are listing this as freeware because, although based on open source and free software components, the end licence is a proprietary IBM non-warrantable one.

One of the most maxims of project management is the 5 Ps: “proper planning prevents poor performance”. And one of the easiest ways to plan out a project is a Gantt chart, which details each phase of the project, what needs to happen before it starts, and what depends on each step. And that’s where Gantt Project comes in. …read more »

Mind mapping, as developed by Tony Buzan since the 1960s, is used widely as a note taking tool for business, a revision tool to aid memory, and as a general tool for organising information. …read more »

The best way to manage your money is never to spend it. However, if you are a mere mortal and like eating, drinking and living in a house then there is no option. The next best thing, therefore, is to manage your money wisely and there is stuff out there to help you. (And me!) …read more »

If you don’t want to buy Microsoft Office for your computer (or, if you’re running Linux or another operating system, where Microsoft Office isn’t available), what do you for a word processor or a spreadsheet? Or a presentation module? Or even a desktop database? Well, for about ten years, the prime option has been OpenOffice. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems, when Oracle took Sun over a separate foundation span off to continue its development as a self-sufficient, self-supporting foundation, similar to the Mozilla foundation, which acts as custodian for Firefox, Thunderbird and other projects.

LibreOffice is great – it feels (according to my completely unscientific measurements) just a little bit faster and more stable than OpenOffice. …read more »