As we are running a small company ourselves, we thought it would be a good idea to put up some recommendations for good, free software that the small enterprise can use. A company can save a lot of money by consistently choosing software that is either Open Source, Freeware, or another form of free licence. In our opinion these applications can be equally good as their proprietary equivalents (although not always).
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Free Online Backup from XDrive |
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In my quest for a good online free backup service that works I have finally arrived at XDrive. This service offers 5GB free storage space as I write this. If you organise your data so that you only store business critical data, then this could cover all the backup needs of a small company. If you need more space, you can always start paying!
XDrive has an incremental backup system that works. That means that a full backup is only needed the first time you backup (and this can take time, it took the whole night from my computer). But after that only the changes are backed up, and this does not need to take much time at all.
The benefit is obvious: by using an off-site backup solution, you are safeguarding critical data also if you should have a fire in your office. |
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Firefox is a web browser that is in many ways better than its main opponent, Internet Explorer. It does not have quite so many advantages after IE 7 came, though. It is better at adhering to web standards for layout than IE, but maybe the best advantage it has is the ease with which third parties can make extensions to it, making it a highly extendable browser.
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No need to pay to use WinZip! QuickZip does the job equally well, although does not have quite as good user interface. Can compress/uncompress files of type .zip, .tar, .gz and others.
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MySQL is a lightweight database server that has become very popular on the web. The reason for that is that even though it's free, it still has most of the functionality that is needed in a dynamic website, and moreover, it's very fast. This excellent database is continually under development by its Swedish owner, so you can expect future improvements as well.
What does it do?
Why would you need MySQL. Well, you could use it for most database purposes where you don't need support for complex transactions. But for the most part it is used to build web enabled applications together with PHP.
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OpenOffice is an alternative to the Microsoft Office package. It contains applications for wordprocessing, slide presentations, spreadsheet, graphics and database. It is very compatible with MS Office, so you can for instance open, edit and save Word documents in native format.
What does it do?
You can do word processing (writing), calculations, charts, slides, graphs, database and much more.
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Filezilla is an excellent FTP client that does the job equally well as many paid-for competitors. The user interface is quite intuitive, it's fast, and it has the functionality that most people need in an FTP client. The only thing it doesn't have is the ability to synchronize between folders on the remote and local system.
What does it do?
Filezilla helps you download and upload files to and from an FTP server. Web hosting companies will give you access to use FTP to upload files to the web server, and this is maybe the most common use of an FTP client. You can also use it to send files that are larger than those that can easily be sent via email. It could also be used to backup important files to a remote server for safe storage.
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