Companies of all types and sizes turn to open source software to remove the high costs typically associated with commercial software. In turn, open source software has become a core part of the way businesses operate.
Here are 13 software solutions - both up and comers and recognized ones - to consider.
Content Management System
OpenCms
This professional website content management system offers numerous built-in features and is fully browser based. From Alkacon Software, OpenCms software is installed on a Web server and users access the system from any location with their Web browser.
Joomla!
This is a free, open source and mobile ready way to build your website, which features thousands of features and designs. Joomla! boasts more than 35 million downloads and offers ease-of-use and extensibility, two of the many reasons it is one of the most popular open source CMSs available.
Drupal
Millions of people use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. Its thousands of add-on modules and designs empower users to build any site they can imagine.
WordPress
As the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, tens of millions of people use WordPress every day. Additionally, WordPress is completely customizable and can be downloaded by anyone with a web host that meets some minimum requirements.
Customer Relationship Management
SugarCRM
Customers and developers can have complete access to Sugar's open platform, making it a highly flexible CRM solution. As businesses grow, Sugar can easily be modified, extended and integrated to meet changing needs quickly and effectively.
Zurmo
Easy to use, easy to customize and stable, Zurmo can be adapted to nearly every business use case. While there are many improvements in the works for this CRM, Zurmo shows the beginnings of a high-quality sales force automation tool.
SplendidCRM
The SplendidCRM 7.0 Community Edition (open source version) includes core CRM features, such as accounts, contacts and leads, but it excludes advanced features, such as reporting and order management.
Webmail
Roundcube
This open source webmail software provides a desktop-like user interface, which is easy to install and configure and runs on a standard LAMPP server. Roundcube's webmail project is available in more than 70 languages, features drag-and-drop message management, privacy protection, unlimited users and messages and more.
SquirrelMail
A standards-based webmail package, SquirrelMail is written in PHP, has very few requirements and is easy to configure and install. Additionally, SquirrelMail has all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books and folder manipulation.
Calendars
WebCalendar
This PHP application is used to maintain a calendar for a single user or an intranet group of users. It can also be configured as an event calendar.
BORG Calendar
BORG is a calendar and task tracking system written entirely in Java.
Document Management
Alfresco
Alfresco's community edition offers the industry leading, open source document management system to capture, search and collaborate on documents. It uses familiar interfaces (e.g. Yahoo, email, Google, etc.) to get rapid user adoption built on a repository that offers transparent, out-of-sight services for full ECM.
OpenKM
OpenKM is an Open Source Electronic Document Management System, which can be used by companies of all sizes as a useful tool in processing knowledge management. The OpenKM source code is free to use, modify and redistribute.
Word Processing
OpenOffice
Apache OpenOffice is an open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. OpenOffice can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
AbiWord
Similar to Microsoft Word, AbiWord is a free word processing program that is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. Users can collaborate with multiple people on one document and can store and share documents. Additionally, AbiWord performs format conversions quickly and easily.
Analytics
Piwik
This Web analytics software program aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics and provides users with detailed real-time reports on website visitors.
CrawlTrack
CrawlTrack provides users with a detailed webmaster dashboard that offers number of visitors, referrers, amount of crawlers, trends, server load and more.
Forums
SMF
Simple Machines Form enables site owners to set up an online community easily and quickly. It also gives users full control of the message board's layout.
Vanilla Forums
Vanilla's open source community forum solution is built for flexibility and integration and offers hundreds of add ons.
