El Free software It is intended to cover each of the technological areas that exist today, its concept, its advances, its community and its freedom of code have made it the perfect paradigm for the universalization of software. Its SMEs the main beneficiariesDue to the possibility of using endless tools that were previously only intended for large companies.
Now, SMEs have a very important challenge, to make the use of free software a perfect complement for their growth. It is where the community must certainly contribute its greatest grain of sand, contributing its ideas for the use of free software in SMEs, giving adequate support to each of the applications, creating adequate documentation and above all innovating in each of the solutions made.
There are numerous success stories where the use of free technology has allowed SME earnings have grown, In addition to that, many processes have been standardized thanks to free tools, in the same way small family businesses have become large production companies due to the use of for example web technology for your online sales.
Among the many Ideas to use free software in your SME, the following stand out:
- La creation of web portals It is undoubtedly the easiest way to introduce free software in SMEs, we can create from small blog, pageto institutional, online stores to complex intranet. There are several free tools such as wordpress, mambo, joomla, drupal, quanta and many others That allow us make professional quality sites quickly. Many are the brands that have bet on the use of free software in their web development such as: Google, Amazon, Twitter and Wikipedia among others and in Spain sites such as make meprecio.com y homemania.com are an example of this.
- Convert any computer into your SME's Server It is possible thanks to the various GNU / Linux distros such as Zentyal, Centos, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Open Suse among others. In the field of servers, almost any company including Microsoft, Stock Exchanges, Amazon, Facebook, Toyotas, among others, use Linux to manage their servers and it is something that SMEs should imitate.
- In the area of office automation free software is not far behind offering robust tools such as LibreOffice, OpenOffice and several dozen other applications, which will allow you to work from plain text documents to spreadsheets.
- But if of fully manage your company's processes It is, free software offers excellent ERP that will allow you to manage from the receipt of merchandise, inventory, sale, purchase, storage to billing and accounting. Among the many ERP we can highlight Idempiere, Adempiere, Odoo, WebErp, Saltos, Einestic among others. Complementing with other Business Management tools such as SugarCRM, Vtiger, SplendidCRM, etc., you can create large totally free management suites.
- Thanks to tools like Alfresco or Knoledge Tree your SME can have a very professional and organized document management.
- A very neglected area in SMEs is communication, but thanks to Asterisk you can have an authentic telephone exchange where VoIP communications stand out.
There are open source alternatives for almost all proprietary applications on the market, at the enterprise level open source not only competes but also surpasses many already established applications in quality. The use you can give it is in your imagination and your desire to learn. But if you still have doubts about the use of free software in companies, do not forget to read Who uses GNU / Linux? and surprising.