With continuous improvement in software and technology open source software has come a long way. But the benefits and requirements of open source will be determined by the type of business unit deploying it. For improving a business operation process or starting up a new unit, you need to ensure that the right software package is selected.
There are certain areas that you need to focus on while choosing the right software toolkit for your business as below:
- When it comes to selecting the server, Apache is one of the popular open source web server software. It comes free of cost and other benefits include its user friendly usage and handling and that it does not require huge overhead like that of IIS. However note open source is not limited to web servers only. If SMB sharing is what you need, Samba is the ultimate solution.
- If your business is about online sales and marketing, Presta shop is one of those software packages which is not only popular but comes with relevant and superior upgrades and features irrespective of the license. It is advisable to check for the features regularly in the market place while you select the software package for your business unit.
- If your business unit is based on podcasts or videos and multimedia, Audacity is the toolkit you would need. Open shot is another popular hit on the list but it does not override the benefits of Audacity. Audacity comes with a superior video editor which is absolutely easy to access and handle. Also the prices are quite lower.
- For cloud based solutions, the options are Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE, Amazon and Rackspace. These are bigger companies and might seem expensive and agreements might seem tough for beginners or smaller business. In that case there are tools like ownCloud via which you can take advantage of its hosted cloud solutions or may design as per your requirement.
- Big data is a familiar term today and is used in collaboration with open source. There are some innovations like in memory data and live kernel patching which make the most of open source software solutions.
- When selecting the software, you need to ensure that it should allow users’ collaboration. There should be collaboration tools which are generally available in the open source market, but you should choose the right one. Some examples include cyn.in community edition, Zimbra open source edition and Kolab which are the popular collaboration tools deployed by most business units.
- Every business process operates on workflows, a task gets automatically assigned to a user and goes to the next team for the upcoming activity. In order to ensure a perfect functioning of your business unit the workflows should be defined well. The common workflow tools include CRM, HRM, ERP, BI and BPM.
- Generally the daily BAU activities are done via web browsers. However if a desktop is deployed with Linux it will perform the same activities without virus and malware attacks along with updates that pressurise the system and lower its performance! This also takes care of the security part as an add on benefit!
Give your business the boost it needs with a powerful open source software application development with the above mentioned features.
Hello james, nice article. being a small business owner, we always face an issue of low budget. so we always try to choose best from the least. somehow we manage the negotiation with the vendors. btw thanks for sharing the article.