Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

Looks like IBM is going aggressively up against the Outlook/Exchange juggernaut. Several months ago, they made Domino, their mail server, free for any business who buys the licenses for the mail client, Notes. Now they’re making Notes available for Linux. The Notes/Domino combination is more than just an email system–it’s a complete database system, including calendaring, team rooms, private intranet features, addressing, and much more. While Notes is a lot different, with a fair learning curve, my clients who use it absolutely love it.
IBM unveils Lotus Notes client for Linux

Over at Freelock Computing, we’re learning the fundamentals of business from experience. We’ve been doing technology for a long time, but are relatively new to business, so what we’ve learned is hardly innovative or new. But we seem to be honing in on different computing solutions to support the four key parts of any business: marketing, sales, operations, and finances.

As mass markets become micromarkets, marketing becomes ever more important. If people don’t know about your services, how can they buy from you? But marketing is not always enough. At a certain point, sales takes over. Sales, in the Internet age, is not about selling some product you don’t really need, but about developing a relationship with your customers until they have enough confidence, trust, and desire to buy from you.

Our favorite marketing guru, Seth Godin, writes about how a good sales person truly helps his customers: Seth’s Blog: Hard sell at the farmer’s market

Sitepoint has a nice summary of when to get a merchant account, versus when to use a third-party payer such as Paypal, complete with detailed example total costs for different types of businesses. Required reading for those thinking about accepting credit cards over the web, who do not already have a merchant account.

Solve the Payment Processing Problem [eCommerce]