Startups, Process automation and Open Source

Open Source Community is doing a great service by consistently coming out with new products and upgrading the existing products. I have been a user of Open Source Softwares (OSS) for a long time and have used OSS for Project Management, Expense management, Software Development, Relational Database and even Office suite. So as a natural choice, I have decided to use OSSs for my startup for each and every function. So lately I have been doing a bit of research to figure out OSSs for various functions. While compiling the list, I realized there are plenty of them and I thought it will be useful if I post them as reference.

Office Suite: Typically an office suite includes Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation tools (Like Microsoft Office Suite). The best product in this category is by Microsoft, by far. Anyways, I was discussing about OSSs. The OSSs come in two flavors:

Office Suites as SaaS (Software as a service): Google Docs and Zoho Virtual Office are two of the better products in this category. Though they offer more than just office suite. Zoho, for instance, offer webmail, Contact management, News and Announcements, Tasks management etc.

Conventional Office Suites: Openoffice.org (It is now named as such because of trademark issues with Open Office) is the best alternative to MS Office. It has now a much improved interoperability with MS Office i.e. you can create and share documents compatible with MS Office.


Financial Accounting System: You have to take care of your finances, right so you need some tool to handle this function. Excel is an excellent tool (so is Openoffice.org) to start with, but you need to quickly move to a sophisticated tool because of process efficiency as well as compliance. Here is to name a few:

Adaptive Planning
osFinancials Planning
OpenBravo – This is a comprehensive ERP suite meant for SME.


Communication: Skype is one of the best communication tools to handle text and voice chat at a low cost. For emailing, I don’t need to say anything.

Servers & Other Resources: Sun Microsystems started an alliance program for Startups for companies in India, China and the US. It was launched on August 8th, 2007 for India. It is a great way of offering support to people like us. Under this scheme they propose to provide discounted pricing for servers and licensed software. However, There is a qualifying and joining formality.

Website Design Resources: Web presence is essential for any startup nowadays. Open Source web site design and Open Web Design will help you in that. Additionally there are content management websites which helps you in developing and managing complete website e.g. OpenCMS and Umbraco .

Disclaimer: The references given above are by no means complete. These are indicative at the best. In case you need to explore further, I have given below names of the two most prominent OSS repositories.

The most prominent open source software repositories are: Sourceforge and Code Plex .

Cheers
Abhishek