Watch Out! Business Apps Ahead. No Fun Zone – Serious Business Only.

This entry is about a series of open source applications that I have been watching, but have had no time to try. In fact, the company that I work for would not have anything to do with these apps because they are open source, and the company management would not even consider using free, or “unsupported” applications for their core business applications. If you have this attitude, then jump ship, because I have nothing but good things to say about these pieces of software, and nothing but praise for the hard-working developers who have brought these prize pieces of software to us.

First up, Auto Project Planner: This is a replacement for Microsoft Project and contains everything a project manager could want in a piece of software to make his/her life so much easier. You input employees, test resources and time schedules, and out pops the answer. Now this is not hard code open source since this application is hosted at codeplex.com. This software will most likely only work on Windows and absolutely needs the .NET framework. The only thing missing from this app is Gannt charts, which, since I use a lot, I just use GanttProject.

Second: Interleave is an enterprise-ready workflow application. This application needs a serious server, and so is not for the SOHO, or for an office whose workers like to actually talk to each other. If you have offices in even two cities, and the documents keep falling through cracks into some person’s lap, or get lost in some bit bucket in the ether, then you need something like this software. The Web site says that the process of setup and import of data takes as little as one hour. In my experience, I needed a day — mostly because I am not a real Web admin and had to ask some questions and search Web sites for answers — but it was all accomplished. I even imported some data from Excel and other sources just to spend some time doing this process. I could go on and on about this wonderful application, but my bosses would never let me put this application in our server rooms because it is open source and could have security risks! If you haven’t guessed yet I am very mad at these closed-minded, hard-headed suit types who remind me of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert! Anyway, this application can be used for so many things that you should visit the applications page here.

Third, but far from last: Simple Groupware & CMS. Calling this software simple is like calling a tree that has pears, apples, oranges, and nectarines a fruit tree: a gross understatement. This application incorporates e-mail, iCalendar, contacts, tasks, document management, synchronization with Outlook and cell phones, full text search, WebDAV, vCard, LDAP, SyncML, POP3, SMTP, CIFS, CSV, and is completely customizable. I know that is not the longest sentence ever, but it sure has a lot of acronyms! Installation instructions include using MySQL, PostgreSQL, and (God forbid) Oracle 10.x, under the following OS, Linux (Debian, Suse), and Windows with XAMPP, and again (God forbid) Microsoft IIS. So the installation instructions have covered most if not all the bases possible in this world, and actually work since I installed this system at my house, and use this software on my Ubuntu server box, just so I can brag about my totally awesome, free and totally secure Web server. I do this just so that when the suits in the upper offices have to hire a guy to maintain and apply patches to their commercial system I can tell them “I TOLD YOU SO!” This software is so good that the entire company is a single developer who writes Web based software and Web sites using this platform!

If you are an middle or upper manager for a multi-location company who thinks Microsoft is the end all and be all of this world then suck rocks, because these three applications alone blow Mickeysoft out of the water and provide nearly everything for which Microsoft charges thousands of dollars. OK I apologize, you managers have a hard time I am sure, since you have to deal with your bosses, and you don’t want your asses on the street, just like I don’t want to be in the soup. But please, please do yourself and your group leaders a favor and set aside a week of time for your in-the-trench geeks to play with this stuff. The IT personnel will be so happy with getting rid of the Microsoft stuff that they will let you have all the credit just so they (the IT trench people) don’t have to apply so many Microsoft patches over and over again that cause so many server interruptions that you need five spare servers just to apply patches to just in case Microsoft didn’t test on a system like yours. This is what I spent the last two weeks on, and it was never-ending Microsoft bashing over this feature lost, and this interruption, and diagnosing this other problem caused by another Microsoft patch!