Best Open Source Alternatives To Enterprise Apps 348
PeekAB00 writes "With 2009 IT budgets getting chopped down John Perez came up with this list of 25 best alternatives to enterprise applications (e.g DimDim over Webex, SugarCRM instead of Seibel, Zenoss over HP OpenView). John's list is somewhat eclectic. I am curious to hear what other enterprise (let's be frank ... expensive) apps I can replace this year with open source ones. I am particularly interested in back-up and email archiving suggestions."
AMANDA (Score:2, Informative)
SugarCRM is old hat. (Score:4, Informative)
OpenGOO kicks the crap out of SugarCRM when it comes to useability. I was ableto switch an entire office over to it with a crapload of buy-in by the secretaries and other non techie users simply because of how easy it is to use.
http://opengoo.org/ [opengoo.org]
the most cost effective applications on the market (Score:4, Informative)
That's what the TFA says.
Strangely they include stuff like vBulletin, which, while open source software, is not free software. Neither beer nor speech.
I wonder how anything with a non-zero pricetag can be more cost-effective than something that costs nothing.
They should have mentioned phpBB instead of vBulletin.
Database Sofware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:SugarCRM is old hat. (Score:3, Informative)
I've only played with OpenGoo on my test server as a single user so far but it impressed me with the speed and ease of use. I expected a word processor through a browser to be slow but it's damn snappy. The presentation suite looks useful too. I did notice a lack of spreadsheet software in the suite (at least for now) but it has the advantage of being able to install on your own server, and therefor keeping Google's greasy paws out of your data. It seemed stable enough too, perhaps I was expecting an early beta project. I can see OpenGoo going from strength to strength as they get more recognition and users.
Bacula is an outstanding cross platform solution (Score:4, Informative)
If you're looking to back up Unix, Mac, and Windows systems, then check out Bacula:
http://www.bacula.org/en/
I've got this running on 7 systems at work. Some use tapes, while others back up to a RAID array. It is fast, stable, and robust. It does not rely on Samba, NFS, or any other services. It has its own file and storage daemons. It will also do VSS backups of Windows clients, allowing open files to be backed up.
Re:AMANDA (Score:5, Informative)
Amanda has support for 'virtual tapes' -- files that hold your backups. You can then burn these virtual tapes to DVD or BD later.
Re:OpenOffice works on Windows??? (Score:5, Informative)
Open Office contains Impress which is comparable to Powerpoint. Animated slides/drawings are much easier to do on Impress than on Powerpoint at the time I used both.
BIRT Over Crappy COGNOS (Score:3, Informative)
If you're developing an Enterprise App in Java, for example, you often end up with some requirement to add reporting to the system. There are several approaches and all of them come with costs and pain. Having been the proud owner of several batches of these requirements, I have experience to offer a relevant point of view. To wit:
You need to write a custom meta-data-driven reporting system:
Re:NOT all open source (Score:5, Informative)
DimDim went GPL and you can download the source from their website.
Re:SugarCRM is old hat. (Score:5, Informative)
SugarCRM and OpenGoo are entirely different beasts; OpenGoo is Google Apps you can install on your own hardward; while SugarCRM is designed for Sales Force Automation, as well as a platform for design business applications.
That said, SugarCRM is a great platform for building business web applications on to replace aging VB, Foxpro, and other legacy database applications, that can be designed with a point and click interface and extended easily with PHP. I think most of the applications I've done for my previous SMB employer in the past I could have built on SugarCRM is half of the time and with more features.
Re:Forum software enterprise, but no Exchange? (Score:1, Informative)
There is an Open Source Exchange/Outlook alternative:
http://www.inverse.ca/contributions/sogo.html
Re:Forum software enterprise, but no Exchange? (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at Zimbra. They have a free version and a licensed (read: supported) version, and because the client is written in AJAX it'll work in most every modern browser. They also have connectors for Outlook and Evolution, and I think Thunderbird, if you'd rather not use a web client.
Zimbra is so good, I'm shocked it wasn't on his list. The one caveat is it's owned by Yahoo!, so if they either go away (doesn't seem likely) or do get bought out by Microsoft (also doesn't seem likely at this time), the support for it may disappear. But then, it's open source, it'll never really die, will it?
Open Source Solutions (Score:4, Informative)
7-zip instead of WinZip
Alfresco for document management and workflow
Zimbra (or Google Apps) instead of Exchange
Firefox instead of IE (yeah, you'll save money by not having to remove all the magically installing spyware)
MySQL or PostgreSQL instead of MSSQL (come on people, open source is about choice - use whatever open source dbms you want and quit fussing!)
xTuple instead of Quickbooks (great enterprise-class accounting/sales/CRM/inventory software that can truly rival the "polished quality" of Quickbooks with pretty much the same features)
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:3, Informative)
If you're using it on a intranet server for business collaboration then it'd be fine but as far as putting it on the web, I'd avoid it. I actually just migrated the two phpbb forums I had to vB.
SMF is the other major open source contender and it does somethings better and other things worse than phpbb... I'm still using it for one of my forums but thats only because part of the point of the site is that it's 100% open source so...
Really IPB and vB are both better choices but neither are free. Interesting enough they both USED to be free. It seems that in the forum world once they reach a certain level of usefulness they close those doors and start collecting license fees.
It's astroturf. (Score:4, Informative)
It is a very well written troll.
FTFY.
Visit jerryleecooper .com (link busted on purpose) for more trolls in the same vein. Looks like astroturf.
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:3, Informative)
So they could easily do the same thing and go commercial and non-freely available too without any rights for anybody to fork it later on. Hence why I'm not interested in using their forum for any serious site.
Re:Forum software enterprise, but no Exchange? (Score:2, Informative)
True open source exchange replacement ain't easiest to find.
eGroupware 1.6.x & Thunderbird (boosted with Lightning calendar and Funambol mozilla plugin to do SyncML on contacts & calendar) & SyncML capable mobile phones is what we are using quite successfully.
Zarafa & Zimbra & Scalix are alternatives too IF you are ready to pay for advanced options.
Re:Bacula is an outstanding cross platform solutio (Score:3, Informative)
It has a little friend (I'd say brother, but they aren't in any way related) called Backuppc which does disk-to-disk backups. It won't natively back up open Windows files, so database dumps or VSS scripting is needed.
It does, however, do pooling (industry calls it deduplication). I have the equivalent of 9 TB of backups (2 months of weekly fulls and daily incrementals) stored on less than one TB of space. The actual amount of raw data being backed is about 1.5 TB: 558 GB compressed and 188 GB uncompressed on disk (746 GB).
Bacula doesn't do deduplication so its d2d capabilities are limited. But its tape abilities are comparable to anything out there (if you don't mind losing the GUI).
Re:Can't take recommendations seriously (Score:1, Informative)
The same reason everyone else has: Parroting the party line
Re:OpenOffice works on Windows??? (Score:4, Informative)
Altera has the free-beer "web edition" of Quartus which is full featured and installs to your computer. I have no clue why they call it web edition. I have seen open source simulators, but not synthesizers. It has more to do with the FPGA internals being proprietary, I think, than a desire to monopolize the software.
Re:OpenOffice works on Windows??? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, for serious work Latex is much better.
Zabbix better than Zenoss (Score:5, Informative)
We just did an evaluation of tools like Nagios, Munin, Zenoss & Zabbix and chose Zabbix [zabbix.com]. It's a little more effort to get going than Zenoss: compile from sources for the free version create your own account, move the files around yourself, etc than Zenoss (RPM install). But once going you're instantly more productive. Zenoss touts their strength as an agentless solution, but in practice I found that I didn't get a single system out of an initial scan of 50 PCs that picked up all the information is was supposed to get, or didn't give me a splat of SNMP errors to boot. Plus you have to block out a day to learn the Zenoss language of zenThis, zenThat, zenTheOther to even begin to understand the product and work out what you want to capture.
Zabbix by comparison was a loads easier. Edit the client conf file to point back to your server then copy the client agent conf file to the target, and the agent binary, following their instructions (create an account for it on Linux) start it, and you're done on the client side. From the server, login to the web page and follow the instructions for adding a new client and linking it to the appropriate system template. Instantly it starts collecting data and (after a period of time) you can view what it's collecting in graph form. The graphs have a nice zoom feature too: just click, drag and release on the bit you want to expand. I'm not even beginning to do this tool justice, it can do so much more than this. Go see their web site.
Zenoss looks a bit prettier, but Zabbix blew them away on ease of use once it was up and running. Oh, and Zabbix can do agent-less too using SNMP templates for things like network switches, if that's the way you want to go. Oh (again) be aware that if you have a mix 32bit and 64 of Linux builds (as we do) that you compile the agent binary for the box you're putting it on. They provide pre-built win32 and win64 agents for you.
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:5, Informative)
Typically, the Slashdot summary gets it wrong. The article is called "The 25 Best Alternatives To Your Enterprise Applications & Functions" and describes the list as "some of the most cost effective applications on the market that can easily replace some of your more expensive Enterprise solutions and functions." However, the article confusingly has an Open Source logo prominently displayed and doesn't very well distinguish between Open Source, free of cost, and low cost alternatives.
Re:Full text searching engines (Score:3, Informative)
I use Sphinx as well on http://www.mystock.com/ [mystock.com] and can agree that it's amazing. Also, if you're using UltraSphinx I must suggest you have a look at Thinking Sphinx, it's a better Rails plugin all around though I can't speak to your specific use case. FWIW it also works in Merb.
I actually just donated some money to Sphinx yesterday, because Andrew Askyanoff (lead dev from Russia) spent some time on Skype with me getting an issue sorted out where Sphinx's BM25 algorithm was a bad algorithm to use on a particular use case, and he pointed us to use wordcount and it was much better for that use case.
Anyway, just a bit of info, esp. if you haven't seen Thinking Sphinx. Pat Allan develops that, and he is currently in Turkey I think, at least he gets on Google Talk very late still so I assume he's still there :) Anyway, all very good devs involved all the way down the stack.
- Josh Adams
http://www.isotope11.com/ [isotope11.com]
Re:It's astroturf. (Score:3, Informative)
In particular try this [jerryleecooper.com]. It made me laugh hysterically.
Re:BIRT Over Crappy COGNOS (Score:3, Informative)
Do I get shot down in flames for mentioning Jasper Reports [jasperforge.org]?
Get this CD (Score:2, Informative)
Full of free software for Winders.
Re:Can't take recommendations seriously (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting. Tell that to Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Google, Nokia and YouTube. Or, how about Slashdot and Digg - capable of bringing down moderately sized web sites with the click of a million mice?
As has been discussed many times over there are a couple points to make out about these examples.
(1) *ALL* of these sites buttress MySQL with support code. Take a look at what Slashdot has to do to enable MySQL to keep up with the sites needs.
(2) None of these sites are mission critical. Would you TRUST your bank transactions on MySQL? LOL, no way!
Now, I'm not a professional DBA. I'm just a programmer
I was a DBA, I am a software engineer. I have published articles about Windows kernel development and data acquisition. I was CTO at a dotcom, I am currently a consultant have worked directly or indirectly with AOL, Microsoft, Sun, and Yahoo.
but I was one of the maintainers of the MySQL server (I don't get to touch the Oracle servers here except on my local developers instance).
I have managed and developed on many Oracle systems. I have also done the same on Sybase, PostgresSQL, MySQL, DB2, MSSQL, mSql, SQLite, Advanced Revilation (Not SQL, but a database), and others.
I have a very good background on the subject.
I can tell you from personal experience that MySQL is easier to maintain and administer,
Than what?
faster to start up, and requires far fewer system resources to keep going.
Than what?
Judging by just the performance of Wikipedia and Facebook, it seems to perform quite well under heavy load.
You are not looking at MySQL, you are looking at an aggregate system whose performance is a product of the development teams ability to work around MySQL.
None of the sites you mention simply execute a query and display the results. Every single one of them requires a lot of extra programming work to serialize and cache load because MySQL sucks.
So, please tell me what basis you have to place MySQL out of the elite top-tier of database servers?
I think I made my point.
Re:the most cost effective applications on the mar (Score:3, Informative)
Bugtraq isn't where you list bugs. It's where you list gaping security vulnerabilities, of which phpBB is one of the biggest offenders in the world.