Well, as a follow-up to my last post, I thought I would just list some of the free open-source alternatives to your commonly used buisness applications. I’ll try to break this down into categories, list the not free version, followed by the free alternative and a brief description of how well it stacks up.
Office Productivity:
MS Word
Open Office Writer. This does not format documents created in MS Word saved as .doc files completely correct. But, as far as creation of documents, and saving them as the new XML based standard open document format, you are set. The tools work the same as Words tools, and it looks really similar. The best part of Writer is that you can save documents as PDF’s directly in the software without purchasing acrobat.
MS Excel
Open Office Calculate. Haven’t used it yet, but it looks OK.
MS Powerpoint
Open Office Impress. Heard this is a little lacking mostly because it doesn’t include a bunch of clipart and backgrounds already built into it like powerpoint does. But other than that I heard it is functionally a good alternative, and it displays slide shows created in power point very well.
MS ???
Open Office Math, Draw. These are two programs included to seperate out image creation / equation creation from the other software. I haven’t tried either, but I will soon, and get back to you on their usefulness. To be fair, MS Office really lacks in these areas. I’m not a fan of the equation editor, or the built in drawing tools.
MS Access
Open Office Base. Looks pretty good, haven’t dug into it, cuz I don’t hardly ever use access. I’m more of a straight MySQL man, with writing my own stuff to talk to it. I dont’ know many people who use access, and the few that do could get by with a well made spreadsheet instead of a database. Don’t worry to much about this one unless you are a database junky whole loves MS’s databases.
Graphics
Adobe Photoshop
GNU GIMP. Well, you can’t beat photoshop. Adobe has cornered the market for professionals on this one. Most of the normal folk who have never learned how to use photoshop could stand to use this tool instead. My only complaint is that the layout and naming scheme for menus and tools is very different from photoshop, so I get confused trying to use GIMP to do something I know how to do simply in Photoshop. But, I have spent countless hours playing with photoshop for school projects, fun, mischeif, and profit…so I’m not exactly normal like that. There is a plugin, or a project that aims at making the GIMP look like photoshop, so photoshop junkies can make the switch. It is called GIMPshop. I haven’t had time in the last few weeks to install it, but it looks promising.
Illistrator / Freehand
There is some program out, called “Lightwave” i think that is aimed at competing in this segment. I haven’t tried it, since I never found something that I couldn’t do in Photoshop, I’ve never installed Illustrator more than once, so I don’t go looking for alternatives to it. I would love to get some comments from some people who maybe care about this part.
Pretty much in my mind, the buck stops at Photoshop for graphics, but I will mention that there is a free version of Maya3D, which is what the movie professionals use to to special effects. Lucas switched his studio over to it for Episode 3, and all of LOTR was done with it. The free version is not limited in any way other than it watermarks any movies you create with “Student edition” or something like that.
Email / web browsing
MS Internet Explorer
Mozilla Firefox If your not already using this, shame on you. IE Sucks. There is an entire blog post on it’s own that could go into how much IE sucks. Just to give you some perspective on how IE sucks, and holds back the internet from being what it could, I spent a long damn time getting my layout for a redesign of the churches website so that it could include some pretty sophisticated tools to manage calanders and events as well as online sermons and such. The only thing delaying it, is that it would take me double that time just to go through and fix my code to work around all of the bugs in Internet explorer, and I haven’t had that time in my schedule as of late.
MS Outlook Express
Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird whips the pants off of Outlook Express. If you actually use that cippled POS outlook express, stop wasting your time and step up to a real email client (by which I mean thunderbird, or the full blown version of Outlook)
MS Outlook / Exchange server
This is an interesting category, because in my opinion Outlook is MS’s best piece of software and the most difficult to replace. This is doubly true when coupled with the very powerful Exchange Server on the back end.
Exchange server, by itself allows you to hook everyone’s outlook together so you can share calanders and collaborate on different projects. It also allows for some great control of how internal email accounts are handled in terms of spam / quotas / and all that. Exchange server also gives an outlook-like webmail client, which is pretty nice.
The upcoming project Zimbra looks like a great alternative. Give the hosted demo a shot if you want, it has some great features including the ability to drag and drop your email from a webmail interface. The plus side of this free alternative is that it can plug into Outlook and act like Exchange Server for the backend (or the place you tell outlook to download your email from), so you can share calanders and do most of the same things as exchange server. It also lets you plug into mozilla’s sunbird (calandering stand-alone software) as well as thunderbird, and many other free email / calander clients.
I’m going to keep my eye on that one, I think it has a lot of potential.
The OS of choice to replace windows is either
Ubuntu Linux, or
Linspire
I’m going to be installing both of those distributions of Linux before long to find out if they are ready for the not-so-tech-savy among us. If not, then no harm, because all of this free software I’ve been mentioning runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
So, that is my personal list that I’ve discovered (mostly through reading slashdot) of free alternatives for office related software. I’ve left a lot of holes (I only have an hour for lunch) so feel free to post other suggestions or alternatives.
One last thing of note, this is software out there, called asterisk, that is free, that you can install over Linux and it works to handle all of your voice-mail boxes, and all of your call routing and call forwarding. Best part is it can operate with regular phone lines or Voice-over-IP (VOIP) technologies simultaneously. It only requires a $25 special card for the phone line, and can run on pretty minimal hardware requirements for small amounts of users and incoming calls.