The Best Freeware for Small Businesses - petrusnich1967

For too many another people, the articulate "free software" conjures up images of pirated brand-name applications or poorly supported third base-class programs. If that's what you think of freeware, you'Re missing an opportunity to save your commercial enterprise a peck of cash.

While most of your employees will comprise more old with heavily marketed commercial programs such arsenic Microsoft Office (let's foretell this class "payware"), they won't take long to learn how to use freeware alternatives such as LibreOffice.

For this roundup, I'll examine five software program categories of significant interest to small businesses–productivity suites, photo editors, website contrive programs, project direction tools, and computing device management utilities–and name the best freeware alternatives to the most well-known payware packages in each.

Productivity Suites

Payware: Microsoft Business office 2022

Cost: $350 per PC for Microsoft Office Vocation 2022; $200 per PC for Microsoft Office Home and Business 2022

Freeware: LibreOffice, Thunderbird, Google Calendar, Google Drive

Cost: $0

Although no retinue matches Microsoft Office feature for lineament, LibreOffice comes pretty skinny, offer free alternatives to Microsoft Countersign (Author), Excel (Calc), and PowerPoint (Instill). These applications support standard Office file extensions too, so you won't bump whatsoever problems initiatory a Microsoft Word document with a .docx filing cabinet extension or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with an .xls file extension and converting them into LibreOffice Author files (with the .odm filing cabinet elongation) and LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets (with the .ods file extension) respectively.

LibreOffice is an ASCII text file and disengage alternative to Microsoft Office.

Note, however, that LibreOffice is an imperfect replacement for Federal agency, since IT lacks two quibbling features: It has no built-in email client (that is, an Outlook alternative), and LibreOffice applications aren't 100 percent compatible with Office. You'll find that IT's difficult to jump aft and forth between the two systems and hold a perfect look into–and more important, macro compatibility–in your files.

To solve the email issue, I suggest victimization another freeware program such Eastern Samoa Mozilla's Thunderbird for node-based email, or Google's Gmail for Web-founded email. You'll need to bunch either of those tools with something like Google Calendar for managing appointments and sending coming together invitations, because Thunderbird doesn't have that functionality away default, and Google Calendar tends to work much better than Mozilla's calendar app, Lightning.

Tech support for LibreOffice and Thunderbird is residential area driven. That substance it's free, but you're at the mercy of your peers if you run into problems. Google provides subscribe for swarm-based services, but exclusive if you sign up for its Apps for Byplay program, which costs $5 per user per month.

Exposure Redaction

Payware: Adobe Photoshop CS6

Cost: $699

Freeware: GIMP, Blusher.net, Photoshop Express Editor program

Monetary value: $0

As with so many a commercial applications that have been on the market for years on end, it's difficult to find a perfect, discharged reproduction of the entire feature primed you'll find in Adobe's Photoshop CS6. Having said that, GIMP (Wildebeest Image Manipulation Program) and Paint.net are two of the Sunday-go-to-meeting free alternatives. For each one does a fairly good job of allowing you to perform basic to intermediate manipulations of photos and nontextual matter.

Although GIMP isn't quite an as hefty as Adobe brick Photoshop, it does provide all the important exposure-editing tools you might ask.

What's missing? A strong user interface, for starters. If you've used Photoshop at all, you'll uncovering yourself hungriness for its rock-solid UI. Depending along the stratum of manipulation you need to perform on your photos or graphics, you might find GIMP and Paint.net to be more difficult to use at best, and altogether nonexistent at worst. Photoshop also delivers more power-user features, ranging from its extensive collection of filters and fractional-party add-ons to its Content Aware Filling.

You'll find any third-political party add u-ons for GIMP, simply most developers commit their efforts to income-producing projects. When you come right drink down to it, GIMP and Paint.meshing more closely lucifer Adobe's $100 Photoshop Elements. What's more, you won't find much in the way of third-company training for either GIMP OR Paint.net; assistanc comes in the form of support from the drug user community.

Nevertheless, you should ask yourself if you really need all the might that Photoshop delivers–don't buy a baseball bat to crack vulnerable a peanut. If you need to crop photos, adjust color balances, cut and snip elements, or futz around with layers, Hitch or Paint.net volition suited the bill.

If you give only primary photo-editing needs, you power conceive Adobe brick's Photoshop Express Editor in chief at Photoshop.com. Using this sword-shaped online-solely tool, you can import images and run a few tweaks (including resizing, cropping, red-centre removal, color adjustments, and a handful of effects) for free. You can't DO much to a greater extent than that, including any rather manipulation that requires you to run a cursor over your image (erasing, cloning, painting, and so on). When you'rhenium finished, you can save your altered photo to your electronic computer or contribution it happening Photoshop.com, Facebook, Flickr, and several other services.

Close Page: Free Tools for Website Design, Project Management, and More

Site Design

Payware: Adobe brick Dreamweaver

Cost: $399

Freeware: KompoZer, WordPress (or Drupal, or Joomla), Notepad++

Cost: $0

I'm not picking along Adobe brick; I could easily substitute Microsoft's Expression Web 4 for Adobe's Dreamweaver. It's simply that Dreamweaver tends to be the first application that pops into developers' minds when you mention the phrase "WYSIWYG editor."

Dreamweaver is a powerful internet site innovation puppet, but you can progress a fabulous site using disengage alternatives.

Dreamweaver, to its credit entry, does a fine lin of enabling professional developers to jump into raw encipher while showing them a reputable representation of what a Webpage will eventually look like. Unpaid developers, lag, can take full advantage of the program's "help me lay my page out graphically" capabilities if their coding skills aren't up to snuff.

The freeware alternative, KompoZer, focuses more on emulating Dreamweaver's Application program element, and much less on that program's extensive site-management features. KompoZer's built-in FTP director helps you commit files back and forth to your website host's servers, and its validator puppet ensures that the code you've constructed meets the standards for whatsoever markup language you're using for your pages.

KompoZer is the best freeware option to Dreamweaver.

Of course, you don't have to use a desktop HTML editor program to build a internet site. Superpowe your site with a free happy management system much as WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla, and, contingent your skill level, the Web app can take care of all the messy design work via prefab themes. You can also use these themes As a jump-off point for a custom look.

KompoZer and the schoolbook-only Notepad++ (for reliable experts) don't come with tech sustain or training. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla get into't either, just IT isn't calculative to incu consultants WHO have mastered these three apps. If you're edifice a simple internet site and you don't need much in the way of customization, none of these content management systems is difficult to learn. If you need client logins, passwords, security measur, and e-commerce elements, but then, you should probably hire an practiced.

Project Direction

Payware: Basecamp or Microsoft Undertaking Professional 2022

Cost: Basecamp ranges from $20 per month for ten projects (including 3GB of storage in the swarm) to $150 per month for infinite projects (and 100GB of cloud storage). Microsoft Project Professional costs $996 per PC.

Freeware: Freedcamp, ProjectPier, TeamLab

Cost: $0

Basecamp is an exceptionally redeeming project-management tool, and Microsoft Stick out is best suited to exceedingly complex projects. I've included both tools present because they're the de facto standards.

Basecamp is a widely utilized project-management joyride.

Freedcamp offers more than just a play on Basecamp's constitute. This Web app closely replicates Basecamp's most important features, sans cost: You canful create projects from scratch or from predesigned templates, you can enjoyment milestones and to-do lists to maintain groups of users organized within projects, you can share files (free accounts are limited to 20MB of entrepot), and you can track the time to each one player dedicates to the project.

Freedcamp requires you to score few compromises–but its lack of a price shred renders it an special value.

Freedcamp's user interface International Relations and Security Network't as smooth as Basecamp's, although you can importee projects directly from Basecamp into Freedcamp–a useful feature for anyone looking to ready the replacement. Doing things as a group within Freedcamp can comprise difficult, though, equally you'll be adding to-State Department and milestones unitary at one time versus victimization a batch process to tot numerous items at once.

Freedcamp doesn't come with tech support or training resources, but you shouldn't want any. If you want other options for grouping collaborationism, deal ProjectPier or TeamLab.

Computer Management

Payware: Numerous

Cost: $40 and up

Freeware: Many

Cost: $0

You give the axe find many types of package tools to help do your business's PCs. Instead than discuss just one category of retail software and one freeware alternative, I'll cross individual here.

Ninite can install a practice bundling of applications automatically, without tying you up for hours.

When you need to set up a multifariousness of programs and utilities onto several computers, look to the Web inferior Ninite, which can put in ten apps like a sho–including the Google Chrome Web browser, Dropbox, Evernote, TrueCrypt, and many more–with little to a greater extent than a sneak click. This service will save you operating room your IT support person a tremendous come of time when you have to deploy brand-new desktop or laptop PCs.

You should, of course, have a backup plan for every computer you deploy, but you wear't inevitably have to pay for an application or a third-political party service to go the occupation done. Windows 7 Professional can back up a calculator's disk drive to a network resource such as a NAS box or server (Windows 7 Home Premium limits backups to local storage), or you can use the free utility SyncBack to copy hand-picked folders to a local drive or network storage device mechanically, according to a docket.

If your business has ten Beaver State fewer PCs, the free Microsoft Security Essentials will hold on them free viruses. To prevent spyware from fetching up residence on these machines, install the free version of Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, simply be careful that this version doesn't provide real-time protection; you'll demand to schedule regularised scans for complete protection.

Finally, you arse protect sensitive information stored on your computers by using payware such as Steganos Sound 2022 ($40), or you can use free encryption software system from TrueCrypt.

Do you have whatever best-loved freeware applications that I didn't cover here? Speak about them in the comments division.

PCWorld Contributing Editor David Murphy has written about the wide world of freeware for years. Helium does hatred paying for things.

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