Enterprise ready open source applications are far too few and evaluating them is sometime very tough deal. To find out the best and most productive among the open source enterprise applications one has to invest a lot of effort and time and has to install them for evaluation. Well worry not, Info World’s Best of Open Source Software Awards (aka Bossies), chosen annually by Test Center editors and reviewers, recognize the best open source software for business users. This year’s top picks among applications include standouts in ERP and CRM software, BI and reporting, content and document management, search, and wiki collaboration. Well what else you need… read on to read about the winning projects.
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Openbravo ERP
Openbravo ERP is an ERP package that combines finance, sales, purchasing, and inventory modules. A free community edition and an extensive professional version are available through commercial license.
License: Openbravo Public License -
SugarCRM
Still the best in open source CRM, Sugar community and commercial editions combine salesforce automation and customer support and offer easy extensibility through plug-ins. The professional and enterprise editions come with advanced features such as more sophisticated reports, workflow automation, a customer portal, and mobile access, though most of the sophisticated plug-ins also come at a price.
License: SugarCRM Public License -
Pentaho BI Suite
The Pentaho BI Suite bundles ETL, OLAP, reporting, and dashboards in a free community edition, with some advanced functionality, professional support, and software maintenance available through an enterprise edition. This year’s 3.6 release simplified report building, disconnecting the process from the underlying OS to allow users to format to any printer. A new drag-and-drop data pallet speeds the creation of reports, while new access to BI server functions through environmental variables means saying goodbye to tedious manual coding.
License: GPL v2 -
Alfresco
Alfresco Community Edition did its open source developers proud this year by becoming the first enterprise content management system to boast CMIS 1.0 compliance. (OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services provides a vendor-neutral Web services interface for sharing data with the likes of Outlook and Drupal, for example.) Strong on both document management and Web publishing, Alfresco’s recent 3.3 release adds a rules library for content automation and more dynamic query options
License: GPL v2 -
Drupal – CMS for the Web
Whereas a full-blown ECM like Alfresco combines document and Web content management, PHP-based Drupal focuses exclusively on the Web. The open source project combines a mature Web CMS with blogs, content syndication, discussion forums, community features, and extensibility through thousands of add-on modules.
License: GPL v2 -
WordPress
WordPress has always been an excellent entry-level blogging and content management system (CMS). With the release of the new version 3.0, WordPress finally merges the multiuser version into the main code branch, making it easier to host multiple WordPress sites on a single installation. Version 3.0 also adds easy navigation menu configuration, custom post types, taxonomies for easier customization, and APIs that let you add custom backgrounds, headers, and footers more easily than in previous versions
License: GPLWordPress -
LogicalDoc
The Java-based LogicalDoc document management system delivers speedy indexing and browser-based search into document libraries. In addition to keyword drill-down and versioning control (replete with comments and alerts on document changes), new features such as search bookmarks, email cataloging, and workflow history round out the essential feature set. On its own, LogicalDoc is rather a lightweight uni-tasker, with a plug-in for rudimentary workflow, but its simplicity masks the power of the underlying Apache Lucene indexing engine that doc searchers will love.
License: LGPL v3 -
Wiki CMS Groupware
Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware is a powerful, integrated, Web-based application. It can build and maintain websites, wikis, groupware, CMSes, forums, blogs, and bug trackers, as well as make them multilingual. While not as widely supported and adopted as MediaWiki, Tiki Wiki is easier to use for publications and documentation sites that are not appropriate for the classic wiki model that allows anyone to edit the content; in Tiki Wiki, a fine-grained role-based privilege system allows you to set up a site in which, for example, readers may leave comments (moderated or not) while editors can approve comments and create and edit articles. Revision tracking is turned on by default and can be enhanced by turning on a workflow system
License: LGPL -
Apache Solr
While search engines have transformed the online world as we know it, there is no doubt that companies and research groups can be well served by running their own search engines and creating custom presentations of results. Solr gives them the tools to do this in a fast, scalable implementation that handles rich documents easily, and it can run on any platform that supports Java. It also offers distributed search, replication of results, and developer access via numerous languages and protocols.
License: Apache License 2.0
