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Big List of Open Source Software

Written by Peter Devereaux | Feb 11, 2013 6:00:00 AM

Companies of all types and sizes turn to open source software to remove the high costs typically associated with commercial software. In turn, open source software has become a core part of the way businesses operate.

Here are 13 software solutions - both up and comers and recognized ones - to consider.

Content Management System

OpenCms

This professional website content management system offers numerous built-in features and is fully browser based. From Alkacon Software, OpenCms software is installed on a Web server and users access the system from any location with their Web browser.

Joomla!

This is a free, open source and mobile ready way to build your website, which features thousands of features and designs. Joomla! boasts more than 35 million downloads and offers ease-of-use and extensibility, two of the many reasons it is one of the most popular open source CMSs available. 

Drupal

Millions of people use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications. Its thousands of add-on modules and designs empower users to build any site they can imagine.  

WordPress

As the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, tens of millions of people use WordPress every day. Additionally, WordPress is completely customizable and can be downloaded by anyone with a web host that meets some minimum requirements. 

Customer Relationship Management

SugarCRM

Customers and developers can have complete access to Sugar's open platform, making it a highly flexible CRM solution. As businesses grow, Sugar can easily be modified, extended and integrated to meet changing needs quickly and effectively. 

Zurmo

Easy to use, easy to customize and stable, Zurmo can be adapted to nearly every business use case. While there are many improvements in the works for this CRM, Zurmo shows the beginnings of a high-quality sales force automation tool. 

SplendidCRM

The SplendidCRM 7.0 Community Edition (open source version) includes core CRM features, such as accounts, contacts and leads, but it excludes advanced features, such as reporting and order management. 

Webmail

Roundcube

This open source webmail software provides a desktop-like user interface, which is easy to install and configure and runs on a standard LAMPP server. Roundcube's webmail project is available in more than 70 languages, features drag-and-drop message management, privacy protection, unlimited users and messages and more. 

SquirrelMail

A standards-based webmail package, SquirrelMail is written in PHP, has very few requirements and is easy to configure and install. Additionally, SquirrelMail has all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books and folder manipulation.

Calendars

WebCalendar

This PHP application is used to maintain a calendar for a single user or an intranet group of users. It can also be configured as an event calendar. 

BORG Calendar

BORG is a calendar and task tracking system written entirely in Java. 

Document Management

Alfresco

Alfresco's community edition offers the industry leading, open source document management system to capture, search and collaborate on documents. It uses familiar interfaces (e.g. Yahoo, email, Google, etc.) to get rapid user adoption built on a repository that offers transparent, out-of-sight services for full ECM.

OpenKM

OpenKM is an Open Source Electronic Document Management System, which can be used by companies of all sizes as a useful tool in processing knowledge management. The OpenKM source code is free to use, modify and redistribute.

Word Processing

OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice is an open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. OpenOffice can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

AbiWord

Similar to Microsoft Word, AbiWord is a free word processing program that is suitable for a wide variety of word processing tasks. Users can collaborate with multiple people on one document and can store and share documents. Additionally, AbiWord performs format conversions quickly and easily. 

Analytics

Piwik

This Web analytics software program aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics and provides users with detailed real-time reports on website visitors. 

CrawlTrack

CrawlTrack provides users with a detailed webmaster dashboard that offers number of visitors, referrers, amount of crawlers, trends, server load and more. 

Forums

SMF

Simple Machines Form enables site owners to set up an online community easily and quickly. It also gives users full control of the message board's layout. 

Vanilla Forums

Vanilla's open source community forum solution is built for flexibility and integration and offers hundreds of add ons.