There's a range of free software and services available to small business owners and since computer software for you maybe the life blood of running your business smoothly, you need to consider free or cheap software that gives as best a result and performance as their major, popular competitors.
In your day-to-day operations you probably use software for a variety of purposes, ranging from e-mail to accounting. Much of this software you can be using for free. But before you get too excited and think you should build your entire business on free software, take a step back.
While free software cuts down on expenditures, it often comes with minimal or no support. If the software you're using is a critical part of your business operations, consider paying for it to get support.
Office Productivity - competes with Microsoft Office, Corel Word Perfect
Open Office is a software suite that contains word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, illustrator, database and mathematical equation creator modules. If you don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for a competing product, Open Office is a viable option.
Customer Relationship Management - competes with Salesforce.com, Microsoft CRM
Sugar CRM is open source software that provides robust sales management, marketing automation, customer support and reporting capabilities. If you find that you're managing your customer relationships using your PDA, e-mail address book or maybe the back of a napkin, you need a system that's more robust and has more features.
Website and Domain Name - competes with Yahoo! Web Hosting, GoDaddy.com
Although half or more of small businesses have an online presence, there are still thousands of small businesses that don't. Microsoft Office Live is a three-tiered service that offers an online presence. Its first level of service is free and includes a domain name, web hosting, e-mail hosting and $50 credit for online advertising. If you're not online yet, you can't beat this offer.
E-mail Hosting - competes with Webmail.us, Mi8.com, Kerio, Microsoft Exchange
E-mail is one of the most important services your business needs. You can pay a monthly fee for a hosted e-mail service, or you can host your e-mail server yourself and pay for someone on your staff or a local techie to manage it for you. Google has a service--Google Apps--that offers smaller businesses free e-mail hosting. You get up to 2 GB of storage per user. Blue Tie also offers a free e-mail hosting service. You can sign up 20 users and every one of them gets 5GB of storage.
PDF Creation - competes with Adobe Acrobat
Want to create a PDF document instead of merely reading them? Then you'll need a PDF creator. You can buy Adobe Acrobat, or you can download the free Primo PDF creator. Once you download it, you'll be able to begin creating PDF documents.
On one final note, it’s important that you know there's also a lot of software you can download to try out for free. If you're satisfied with it, you can then buy the full version after a certain number of days. Download.com is a great resource for this.
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