Useful Free or Low Cost Software Applications for Business

If you're eligible, you might consider applying to Microsoft's BizSpark program. One benefit is up to 10 free licenses for any of their software, including Windows 7, Office, etc.

Bizspark

Google alerts is a great way to keep updated on competitors, your company name and your company products (or anything else). Get emails when new posts or articles or any other content is discovered by google.

Evernote. The best general data capturing service I've yet to use. Comes in: web site, Windows, Mac, and cell phone versions. I think the business applications are endless. It is a free app. Enter text or integrate with a cell phone camera. Take a picture of a dry-erase board from a meeting, upload the note, synchs with desktop, and best of all, the text in the image gets recognized and is searchable. Even has an API to integrate with other applications. If it only was able to have reminders set.

For accounting we use Xero which is an online application. It's only $50 per month and is pretty good for small companies.

We use Google Docs for all our shared documents. It's a bit buggy but does the job. I believe Google Wave will be a great tool for real-time collaboration and as a wiki replacement but it's not a mature application yet.

Zoho is a great free app for email, online docs, and CRM (free up to 3 users). It has won several awards and is regularly featured in "Laptop"/Biz magazines. I've used it for almost two years.

GPLpedia.com (http://www.gplpedia.com) is a place for open source enthusiasts like yourself to discover, share & upload content related to open source software from anywhere on the web in a very organized fashion. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure bog, GPLpedia.com has the best content submitted by our users. GPLpedia.com is all about sharing, discovery and promoting open source software & services. There is always something interesting and unique available in GPLpedia.com.

Inexpensive target market research AskYourTargetMarket.com before you have your own customer base to survey.

1. vtiger for crm
2. joomla for your website
3. evernote for note taking
4. firefox with all its extensions for browsing and information access
5. cobian backup
6. google apps if you have broadband available for word processing, spread sheet, presentations ...
7. google desktop - just give up organizing in folders and simply search even on your network
8. data crow for classifying and building up your resource library of anything you can imagine

if you are in software development

1. cygwin (turning your windows machine to unix flavored one)
2. eclipse
3. subversion/tortoisesvn

QuickBooks Online for basic accounting

I use Unfuddle for its online source code control and ticketing. The basic plan is free.

Adempiere

1) There are at least 25 applications / websites mentioned so far:

• You can make yourself and every employee much more productive when using everyone of those 25+ apps if you obtain and use the free open-source AutoHotKey program.

http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Tutorial.htm

Here is a nice intro to make it even easier: http://lifehacker.com/316589/turn-any-action-into-a-keyboard-shortcut

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2) Are you still using FTP?

FTP is outdated and insecure; any hacker can easily steal your password(s)

Use WinSCP with secure SFTP http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

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Have Fun :o)

One of the users of this site (not me) has free online accounting software.

I might try it for the sole proprietorship I have, but it isn't applicable to corporations. (unfortunately - though they might be addressing that)

EDIT

outright is no longer free. So now I am using Wave Accounting. More like mint.com than outright was.

I've used google groups to host online discussions for products I wrote. I found that it worked fine and did a fairly decent job with spam, though there is still work involved. You can get started very quickly without dealing with phpbb or any other community software and hosting.

I would look into http://pommo.org/ for newsletters. I shot out 3000+ e-mails the other day to one of the communities I manage with ease. If you need help setting it up, let me know.

vtigerCRM and SugarCRM are both open source solutions that help you scale massive lists of contacts. vtigerCRM has a free Outlook plugin. SugarCRM has an Outlook addon but you have to purchase it.

• Magento commerce great open source ecommerce application
• Google Enterprise great email and calendar system
• Pentaho reporting - open source business intelligence

I think it is best to keep customers on your own site and talking/emailing directly with your company, but sites like getsatisfaction and uservoice seem to be popular.

Again, I think it is best to have direct contact with customers and not have them off on some other site. Both are good resources to be aware of.

I have two software applications suggestions:

1. Payroll is a huge hassle for young businesses. We've used Paycycle for our payroll for several years. They take the hassles out of payroll processing. All of the governmental filing is handled electronically. We especially appreciate their low pricing for businesses that are just getting started. Paycycle was recently bought by Intuit so the company has a solid reputation and financial backing.

2. We publish employee time clock software that we'll specially discount as an encouragement to our entrepreneurial friends at OnStartups.com. Virtual TimeClock Basic Edition for both PC and Mac lists for $99 and supports up to 3 employees.

   You can buy Virtual TimeClock for $49 (1/2 off) through December 5 if you mention OnStartups.com when your order. A free trial of Virtual TimeClock software is available on our Redcort Software web site.

Pivotal Tracker looks like a very useful free agile project management tool. I am pretty happy with my free hosted accounts on FB, but I might try this one out.

Every business is different. If you are looking for a great source for everyday business utilities, check out the Bits du Jour site. This is a daily sale software only site. Two or more new software products each day, always at 50% off list or more. I have picked up a number of utilities there that I use every day. Best of all you can preview what software is coming up in the next 7 - 10 days and have them send you a reminder notice when the software product you want is on sale.

Try http://www.zoho.com/ for CRM. They offer a free option and it is easily customized.

I did a lot of research on business applications for my small business books and these two are great productivity tools. Many of the clients I have recommended them to are thrilled with the results.

Here are free business related applications I use often.

http://picresize.com/ or http://www.picnik.com/ to resize pictures and change the file type

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ to figure out time differences

http://www.xe.com/ucc/ currency converter

http://www.primopdf.com/index.aspx convert to pdf

As agile house we use:

• ScrumDesk (http://www.scrumdesk.com) for scrum project management. It is free for small teams, easy to learn as it is similar to physical task boards.
• DropBox for 'virtual office' documents
• Evernote as brainstorming and notes sharing tool
• applications available through BizSpark