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I’ve realized there has not been too much talk of solutions we’ve implemented – Let’s change that! I’m hoping the occasional real life case study might be somewhat informative and expose people to what others out there are doing. So let’s go:
Our Open Source Application(s) of the Month address calendaring and archiving solutions for small business. Did you know calendaring is available in a stable add-on for the Thunderbird email client? And it gets better: Not only that, but you can share appointments with your google calendar from within your email program! Google calendar is a good solution for your business calendar on your website, which is exactly why I set it up: see: http://florenceit.net/calendar.html. You can add/change or update those appointments from right within your email program. You can start with a free open source plugin to allow calendaring within your thunderbird email client. Lightning is a subset of Mozilla.org’s Sunbird standalone calendaring system. This adds some nice basic calendaring (with email invites) to Thunderbird. Then , with additional configuration you can automatically share that data to your public google calendar (on an appointment by appointment basis of course). There is also an outlook plugin (a different product) that is also open source if you need that functionality and must use outlook. You can make your free google calendar private – only sharing w/specific people as well (say as a company only calendar, not designed for the public). I would argue there are far better, inhouse solutions for this if you need the functionality of a group calendar for company eyes only, but if you have a tight budget this should work and is free. This does not offer the slickness of an exchange or other inhouse hosted server solution, but I think you’ll find these useful tools for small organizations. For inhouse calendar and contact sharing, I use SugarCRM as it allows me to manage these newsletters and sync my contacts and calendar between my PocketPC, Outlook AND a secure webserver that I can access anywhere via the web with a secure login.  7-Zip is a windows compression software app that is free and open source. It can offer better compression than winzip and allows easy creation of your own password protected files . I use it for emailing sensitive info all the time.
The cool gadgety thing this month is this ebookwise reader. Do you read ebooks? I have for years on my pocketpc.  I just love the idea of flipping on the computer and gaining access to to new books without a trip to the bookstore or library. There have been a few phases where the ebook industry gained some press, then everyone lost interest, mainly due to the cost or lack of features in the devices used. One of the company’s that failed was the Rocket eBook and their associated ebook webstore (they also used a proprietary format like itunes, which is why I personally wasn’t too interested). Many thousands of these unsold units were purchased by fictionwise, and now these readers can be bought at a fraction of the cost they used to go for (currently $140). The ebookstore seems surprisingly well stocked with current authors, and they do also sell mobipocket format ebooks (which is what I use to read on my pocketpc). Florence I.T. does not sell these but we do offer pretty much any brand PocketPC. I’m thinking about one of these ebookwise readers for my wife, but not sure she’d use it. Fictionwise.com is my new place to buy ebooks though, as they have a great selection and no import taxes like the french based mobipocket ebook store. I just picked up an ebook on fictionwise from one of my favorite irreverent (understatement) funny authors Christopher Moore. Happy summer reading!
Until next time.. Florence I.T. – A community IT shop.
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