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Free Small Business Software

Posted by Serges LaRiviere on Wed, Jul 11, 2012

 
If you are starting a new business and you are looking to keep cost down, or if your business is off the ground it's still a good to keep an eye on expenses. One way to achieve this and still keep your efficiency high is to watch what you pay for software. Instead of buying commercial programs for your business why not look into using a capable free or open-source alternative?  

Here are four three utilities that are designed specifically for business operations. 

 

 

Orange HRM

OrangeHRM SoftwareOrangeHRM Version 2.7 is a complete human resource management program for small to medium size businesss's that will run with MS Windows 7 and Vista. This open source product includes an array of modules that provides personal information management (PIM) and performance evalution and recruitment. This program has been downloaded over 600,000 times and has over a million worldwide users. OrangeHRM also offers a subscription based, hosted service that eliminates the need for installing and maintaining the product internally. The vendor strongly advises reading the installation guide and watching the video provided on their site. 

 

Soluto

 Soluto SoftwareSoluto If you have been frustrated by how long it takes Windows to fully load after you've logged on, join just about every other Windows user on the planet. Well now you can do something about it. Soluto does a very nice job of helping you cut that time down in ways few other program can.

Soluto runs in the background and watches what programs and services load when you log in. It then analyzes how long each of them takes, categorizes them according to whether they are required for Windows, potentially removable from Windows boot, or are instead a "No-brainer" that can easily be removed from boot. It bases this information on what the company calls the Soluto PC Genome, a database about many PC applications that the company has put together.

What really nice about this program is that it will then show you details about each about each application and whether those programs can be removed. It then lets you determine if you want to allow the program to remain in the Windows boot, whether you want to Pauseit (which means you'll have to start the program manually) or whether you want to delay it, which means that Soluto will allow the program to load but not at boot time. In that way, you'll boot more quickly but the program will still be available after several minutes.

The amount of time Soluto will shave off of your boot time will depend on your OS and programs you are running but if your looking to cut your boot time, Soluto is a solid bet.

 

Spiceworks

Spiceworks softwareSpiceworks V4.1 If you're in a business with a small network, little or no IT staff to maintain it, this network inventory and management tool may be exactly what you need. It browser based and not only provides detailed information about all of your network devices but also serves as an IT management tool letting you create and track Help Desk tickets to fix and problems that people have on the network. For a free piece of software it has a surprisingly full set of features.

Spiceworks IT Desktop provides quite a bit of information about each device such as free space, what anti-virus software is being used and even server connection errors. If that isn't enough it even provides an inventory of software installed on each device.

This may be all you need for your network maintenance .  It is scalable to manage even corporate level networks and uses minimal resources.  This is one piece of software we use here at Northampton Computer Repair to manage the shared network we have with Ink & Toner Solutions.  All around it is a solid piece of software that we have been a fan of for years.

 

 For any of these, if you have any questions, feel free to stop down by our office in lovely downtown Northampton or just contact us.

Tags: Human resource, slow computers, IT, Free business software