Mid-Size businesses rarely have lots of dollars to throw at their IT infrastructure, so low cost solutions become the operative word. Given this simple fact of life, open source software seems like it should be a natural fit. As is typically the case in life, things are rarely as simple as they seem. The simple truth of the matter is that open source software can be cumbersome, complicated, and temperamental. All things that can often times be attributed to the people behind that software.

All of that being said, open source software, as a whole, has come a long way; or more accurately, some open source programs have. The biggest complaint I have with people who dismiss open source software is that they aren’t taking into consideration just how generic the term is. I wouldn’t dream of saying, “Commercial software is over-priced garbage.” The simple truth is that while some commercial software is most certainly garbage, the vast majority of it is of high quality and fairly priced. Regardless, the mission of this post is not to debate the merits of the two systems, but to merely point out some of the open source products I believe could help small to mid-size businesses lower their IT budgets without having to pass those savings on to high-priced IT pros.

To be clear about one thing, however I will not be focusing on things like web browsers, mail clients or IM clients. I’m looking for the big game, the things many businesses end up paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for. So here we go:

The Backend Bits

CentOS

The days of actually debating whether or not Linux is “right” for the back-office is thing of the past. CentOS is a “no strings” free operating system based on its commercial cousin Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS has an extremely robust community and good Linux admins that know RHEL/CentOS aren’t that hard to find.

MySQL

My IT roots are in Oracle database administration and nothing saddens me more than to see businesses drop anywhere from ten to thirty thousand dollars on an Oracle database when MySQL would more than do the trick. This database system is wildly popular, a good performer, and a snap to manage when you use a tool like phpMyAdmin.

Nagios

If you would like to know if you’re IT components are down before your customers do, then you need to have Nagios running in your back office. Nagios is easily the most difficult to manage tool in this list and one that will require a skilled hand to manage. Installing the software has become significantly easier with each new release, but getting it setup “just right” for your environment is where the trouble lies.

Splunk

The free edition of Splunk is an exceptional log collection, analysis and search tool that is absolutely vital to any business faced with strict compliance requirements. Like Nagios, the product is relatively easy to install, but takes some time to master. Once up and running, however, the tool can be invaluable asset in meeting strict regulatory logging requirements.

Subversion

Subversion, or SVN, is a source code control repository that is absolute vital to any business that creates or maintains source code or complex configuration files. The product can be intimidating for new users, but is actually quite simple to deploy and use. I personally use SVN everyday for everything from config files, source code, and documents. If you’ve got more than one person maintaining any kind of file, than SVN can be the difference between chaos and order.

Asterisk

Asterisk is not a product I have had a lot of experience with, but what I do know is that it has the potential to save a business thousands of dollars on its telecommunications. Voice over IP is the next big thing in office telecommunications and an Asterisk based telephone system has many of the same features as many commercial systems at a fraction of the price.

Smoothwall Express

The express version of the SmoothWall line is plenty feature-rich for most mid-size businesses. In fact, I can think of a few larger organizations that could trash their high priced Cisco devices and get the same performance and not lose any of the features they currently use.

Scalix

I was never a big fan of Exchange/Outlook until I met Lotus Notes. Once Notes and I were properly introduced I realized why so many businesses had come to rely on Exchange. Until recently I had resigned myself to the simple fact that it really was the only game in town. Then I met Scalix. It is by and large all of the things you need in a mail/calendaring infrastructure at a fraction of the cost. Scalix works with Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, and virtually every calendaring and email client there is.

Up in the Front Office

SugarCRM

The open source customer relationship management market has seen a lot of activity in the past couple of years, but SugarCRM remains the gold standard of open source CRM solutions. I have setup a number of Sugar installations and while my knowledge of sales force automation this tool delivers and then some. The product simplifies the process of tracking leads, opportunities, and possess some robust forecasting features. I’m not a big fan of the document management, issue tracking, and project management features, but their integration makes Sugar a compelling one-stop solution for a number of business functions.

KnowledgeTree

I have yet to encounter a more feature rich document management system than KTDMS. This product easily competes and destroys many of its high-priced competitors. Even the commercial editions of KTDMS are a steal compared to some of the high-profile DMS systems out there. I ultimately decided to use SVN for my own DMS, but that was because I had very little need for the advanced indexing, workflow, and user management features. This product, like SugarCRM, is a poster child for open source software done right.

MediaWiki

Wikis are one of those things you either love or hate. I have yet to meet someone who didn’t have a strong opinion one way or another. The power of wikis is the ease with which you can create an extremely robust knowledge base that is easy to maintain. If you need a web site with a wealth of informal documentation on how to do things, then you need a wiki. The biggest mistake people make with wikis is try to use them as forums, portals, document management systems, or source control repositories. I know I’ve made a few of them myself.

WordPress

WordPress is not just for blogs. While Joomla and Drupal are excellent content management systems, they can be a little intimidating for some people. Given the relatively poor quality of most corporate web sites, sometimes simple really is better. A well designed WP based web site can greatly improve a company’s image yet still keep things simple and easy to manage.

What About …

Accounting

This seems to be one area where I just haven’t found anything I like. The applications that seem to have all of the right features have dreadful, ugly interfaces that make and already dreadful and ugly process that much worse. The applications that have nice, well thought out interfaces often times struggle to balance a checkbook let alone your general ledger. The search continues.

ERP

This is an area I know very little about and one I’m not really prepared to jump into right now. Abe Lincoln said it best when he said, “Better to be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

I’d love to here your thoughts, suggestions, and questions on what software you’d recommend for a mid-size business.

Anyone who follows the WordPress community should be familiar with the recent development that Brian and Jason have teamed up and started creating GPL’d themes. They’ve set up shop over at RevolutionTwo.com and they already have a stunning collection of WP themes available. For the new Red Haven web site, I decided a little “Out with the old, in with the new” might be in order and grabbed a copy of the Office theme.

I’ve made a number of minor modifications, mostly in the color scheme and stylesheet, but I also had to clean up a couple of bugs here and there. There wasn’t anything really serious, just a couple of width and height issues I needed to adjust. There was also a bit of a learning curve on getting images to look just right and figuring out a good taxonomy for categories. The navigation menu above the showcase is completely driven off of categories and that required I change the way I normally use categories some.

Overall, I’m very happy with the theme and eternally grateful to Brian and Jason for the fundamental change to their operating model for quality WordPress themes.

Merrimack PTA Kindergarten and Preschool is a private non-profit organization established in 1961 under the auspices of the Parent Teacher Association of the Merrimack School District.

The MerrimackPTA.com web site is powered by Brian Gardner’s groundbreaking Revolution theme for the WordPress publishing system. This project featured a fair amount of code modifications to the underlying theme, but retained the minimalistic and professional look of Brian’s original vision.

Dandyman.us is my personal weblog for a number of personal hobbies including web design, guitar, and gaming. I use the site to post tutorials, information, and commentary on a variety of topics.

The site is powered by WordPress, as most of my sites are, and features a highly customized version of Evan Eckard’s Notepad Chaos theme. The theme was released by Smashing Magazine for the WordPress community and it has been my most ambitious design customization to date. Extensive XHTML code changes and some significant changes to the original Photoshop design have taken a Evan’s theme in a completely different direction.

TheFarlands.Net is the personal weblog of Donald and Christy Farland.  The site was created to help share stories, photos, and stay in touch with family and friends all over the world.

The site is based on the popular WordPress publishing system and features a high quality theme called “WordPress.Fun” made possible by the folks at Smashing Magazine.  I made some minor modifications to the site design to improve search rankings, added Google AdSense code blocks and implemented a flash based photo gallery.