Technical Support | Managed Hosting

Procur­ing inex­pen­sive and effi­cient soft­ware at home can be a chal­lenge, but there are many ways to put together a set of appli­ca­tions that suit indi­vid­ual needs. This process becomes a bit trick­ier when applied to busi­nesses, espe­cially those just start­ing out or with lim­ited bud­gets. For many com­pa­nies, out­fit­ting offices with a host of brand-name, pri­vate soft­ware pro­grams and licenses is sim­ply unaf­ford­able. And the use of pirated or ques­tion­ably acquired copies puts busi­nesses at risk — not a good move whether just start­ing out or well-established. Luck­ily for busi­ness own­ers, project man­agers, and any­one with a pro­fes­sional inter­est in con­nect­ing their employ­ees with basic qual­ity soft­ware appli­ca­tions, the open source com­mu­nity is com­mit­ted to the devel­op­ment, sup­port, and improve­ment of pro­grams that are often just as good, if not bet­ter, than their big-name coun­ter­parts.
     Case in point: the Microsoft Office suite. A pro­pri­etary com­po­nent of the company’s Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem, MS Office pro­vides busi­nesses across the coun­try, and indeed across the globe, with sim­ple tools for every­day tasks in the work­place. Most com­puter users are famil­iar with Word, Excel, Pow­er­point, and the var­i­ous other appli­ca­tions that make up what was one her­alded as the height of effi­ciency and con­ve­nience. These days, MS Office is sim­ply at the height of profit, charg­ing exor­bi­tant amounts for pur­chase and com­mer­cial use. What’s more, many users find the appli­ca­tions lack­ing in terms of capa­bil­ity, user inter­face, and incor­po­ra­tion with other pro­grams and tools. So why pay a high price for a poor prod­uct?
     Some busi­ness own­ers stick to the old standby because they’re not aware that there are other options. This sense of being “locked in” to the Microsoft machine is a tes­ta­ment to the qual­ity of the corporation’s mar­ket­ing efforts, but it is lit­tle more than smoke and mir­rors. The open source com­mu­nity has many answers to the MS Office suite, which prac­tice and encour­age free use, directly view­able and cus­tomiz­able code, sim­ple and intu­itive user inter­faces, and sound con­struc­tion able to mesh seam­lessly with stan­dard for­mats and func­tions.
     One of the strongest and most well-supported offer­ings from the open source com­mu­nity is the aptly-named Open Office, avail­able for a vari­ety of plat­forms and able to sup­port over 40 lan­guages. This suite fea­tures an assort­ment of basic “pro­duc­tiv­ity tools” that cover the vast major­ity of basic busi­ness oper­at­ing and can com­pletely replace MS Office pro­grams. Open Office includes Writer, a word pro­cess­ing pro­gram; Calc, a fully-functional spread­sheet appli­ca­tion sim­i­lar to Excel; Impress, the open source answer to Pow­er­point; Base, which is an Access-like data­base man­age­ment pro­gram; Draw, an appli­ca­tion for basic vec­tor illus­tra­tion and design; and Math, for use in the cre­ation and mod­i­fi­ca­tion of equa­tions. With this pow­er­ful set of effec­tive tools, busi­nesses on a bud­get and those just get­ting started can frus­tra­tion and expense of MS Office alto­gether and start out on the right foot with open source applications.

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Since 1973, peo­ple have con­sis­tently called on Dave’s Best Lim­ou­sine Ser­vice when pro­fes­sion­al­ism, punc­tu­al­ity, safety and depend­abil­ity mat­ter — mak­ing Dave’s Best Lim­ou­sine Ser­vice the pre­miere shut­tle ser­vice in the Delaware Valley.

     Nearly every com­puter user is famil­iar with that age-old frus­tra­tion: in the mid­dle of a project, whether the cre­ation of a doc­u­ment, a series of in-depth research queries, or even at that crit­i­cal moment within a game, some­thing with a pro­gram goes wrong, and all of one’s work is sud­denly, and inex­plic­a­bly, lost. Even those with lit­tle to no bad mem­o­ries to report about ruined effort can attest to expe­ri­enc­ing their favorite pro­grams fail­ing to oper­ate prop­erly at one point or another. Some­times, these prob­lems will mys­te­ri­ously solve them­selves, leav­ing users to won­der when they’ll rear their ugly heads next. But often, they sig­nal some deeper issue that requires pro­fes­sional help to rec­tify. It is at this point that com­puter users often find them­selves truly stuck: tech­ni­cal sup­port for soft­ware is sig­nif­i­cantly lack­ing for even the most pricey pro­grams. For those con­sid­er­ing going open source — tak­ing advan­tage of the global com­mu­nity that devel­ops and uses free, cus­tomiz­able soft­ware — this frus­trat­ing sce­nario is a thing of the past.
     Tech­ni­cal sup­port for major mod­ern, pri­vate pro­grams is usu­ally based on a help file accessed within the pro­gram itself; these pre-fabricated “guides” tend to address only those issues under­stood by the com­pany itself at the time of the program’s release, leav­ing many poten­tial prob­lems unad­dressed. And of course, if you can’t start a given pro­gram to begin with, get­ting it to dis­play its help man­ual may be a slight chal­lenge. One answer to this prob­lem devel­oped over the past few years is to host this help guide online at the company’s site, how­ever this does lit­tle for users with com­plex or eso­teric issues. These users are, in gen­eral, forced to look for what lit­tle com­mu­nity sup­port exists, either online at an enthusiast’s forum, or in the real world via a paid , how­ever this does lit­tle for users with com­plex or eso­teric issues. These users are, in gen­eral, forced to look for what lit­tle com­mu­nity sup­port exists, either online at an enthusiast’s forum, or in the real world via a paid expert or par­tic­u­larly com­puter savvy col­league. The prob­lem with these options is that online sup­port gurus are far and few between — who wants to spend their time sup­ply­ing advice for pro­pri­etary, costly pro­grams based on secret, red-taped code? And what user enjoys shelling out their hard-earned cash to get a paid tech­ni­cian to fix some­one else’s pro­gram?
     Open source pro­grams by their very nature encour­age peo­ple to share their insight and exper­tise sur­round­ing a pro­gram itself and its poten­tial prob­lems (as well as oppor­tu­ni­ties for improve­ment and expan­sion). As a result, users find that these pro­grams have large and thriv­ing online groups ded­i­cated to help­ing each other solve issues — as well as manip­u­late the pro­gram itself to help ensure bet­ter func­tion­al­ity in the future. This free and gen­uine spirit of sup­port is far supe­rior to the lim­ited trou­bleshoot­ing of pri­vate pro­grams, and is one of the open source community’s major assets. And these sup­port groups are eas­ily found online; a sim­ple search for a given pro­gram will yield many options, from estab­lished pro­fes­sional groups with refined and detailed man­u­als to more rus­tic forums and venues for up to date, in depth res­o­lu­tions. Make the imper­sonal and often unhelp­ful sup­port file of pri­vate pro­grams a thing of the past and let open source sup­port your busi­ness through any problem.