Businesses, for the most part, seem to have a fetish for blowing huge sums of money on office tools and products. One of the biggest expenditures always seems to be their technology related tools. With the most to gain from this is the leader in this area, Microsoft, peddling Windows XP and feeding an addiction to Microsoft Office; but more and more everyday I’m seeing emerging open source technologies that blow Microsoft’s offerings out of the water.

There are hundreds of companies now that provide support for offices that choose to use open source tools, and most of all of the original distributors operate on a business model of accruing revenue through paid technical support. With the support, quality and efficiency there in these alternatives; why isn’t the adoption rate higher?

I began to wonder today, what master recipe would “the new office” follow to address all of its tech needs without the gigantic expenditure; this culminated in the following list:

Operating System
Switching to an “open” office would first involve moving employees who are most likely very familiar with Windows over to an alternative. This alternative would obviously have to be Linux, and lately it’s become clear that the front runner in ease of use is Ubuntu Linux.

Positives: It’s free, stable (worlds better than Windows), loaded with free software, easy to install and use, short learning curve, decreased risk of viruses and did I mention stable?
Negatives: Certain business specific software probably won’t have Linux support, but all that could change if more people adopted Linux

Productivity Software
OpenOffice is the alternative to Microsoft Office, has all the features you need with a minor few left out. Features a word processor, slide, spreadsheet, database and drawing program. OpenOffice reads Office program files like .doc, and also has the ability to save in those formats.

Positives: Free, mimics the functionality of MS Office and matches most features, also has some bonus tools like the built in PDF function to convert any document into PDF format.
Negatives: Small items were left out of the details like the robust reviewing features of Word, and OpenOffice is very lacking in easy-on-the-eyes clip art (if you’re into that sort of thing) and templates for slide presentations.

Email
The top three things I hate from Microsoft are 1) Internet Explorer, 2) Windows OS and 3) Microsoft Outlook. Outlook, though, has unfortunately been engrained in the business world as the best. And really, it is unique, and has a huge range of features which businesses love. That’s why when I heard of a project called Zimbra, I thought it to be a godsend. Zimbra is a mail server system, with a slick, skinnable browser based interface similar to Gmail. It has a huge amount of functionality, and reviews are great. Unfortunately I haven’t tried it myself yet because I have avoided altogether the task of running my own mail server choosing to rely on Gmail for that; but I have played with the demo, and have to say it looks and feels nice.

So those are just some of the, literally, thousands of open source alternatives that businesses have the option of adopting in place of the pricey (lesser quality) commercial products available.

In the end, it is up to the end-user at a company to decide what’s best to use. Some may never be able to “convert”, and some may not be able to get past the idea that something you pay for isn’t necessarily better than something you can get for free. But if you are looking for options, open-source is waiting.

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