Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

New Open Source ERP vendor in Belgium. Interview with the founder here: Open source start-up updates its ERP suite for SMBs

This school made 60 Pentium I and Pentium II computers useful for their students, using a Linux thin-client solution, on a tiny technology budget. Check out their story: Rescuing a School Technology Program: Linux Thin-client Overview OP/ED

There are a number of ways to integrate Linux clients and servers into an Active Directory environment. This article discusses a few of them.

Names of open source projects are suddenly getting ridiculous. Two new names were just unveiled in the Open Source world: Zimbra, and Joomla. While the names may be silly and potentially off-putting, the projects themselves are compelling.

Joomla is simply a new name for a very popular web site management system that was called Mambo. Due to some political in-fighting between the company that sponsored Mambo and the core developers of the project, Mambo has now forked. For now, our bets are on the core developers, who have adopted the name Joomla for the project. At Freelock, we’re closing in on a dozen Mambo installs, so we’re big fans of this software.

Today, we learned about a new project with a funny name, called Zimbra. Zimbra looks like a combination of Gmail, Exchange, and Hula, and they’ve managed to beat Hula to a working release. It’s a mail server, calendar server, and contact/directory server, running on a completely open source stack. They’ve concentrated on doing a rich browser interface and providing a migration path for Exchange. Looks like a very promising project–the demos make me want to get it up and running right now. Unfortunately, it’s primarily a Java application, which is outside our area of expertise. And they’ve made lots of other architectural choices that make this one look difficult to get going. But go check out the demos–this one may well prove to be worth the pain.

Joomla

Zimbra