Often I get the opportunity to help small non-profit groups to deal with computing problems they are having. One of the biggest problems I see is that they have spent all of the money they had for computing on software when they could have use a free alternative. One example of this is with Office software. Those folks over there at that MS do offer some great discount programs for medium sized non-profits but when it comes to a smaller organization like your typical church congregation or animal shelter, the options with them are fewer. Especially in instances like this, alternative (open source) software options can be a great choice. If you are working with the homeless it is a shame to spend 200-300$ on software that you could have essentially gotten for free. That money can make a big difference in a non-profit. In most cases file types are not an issue here. Many of the free titles will work with the files created by many of those other guys apps. Below are some categories of software and suggested options for getting free programs:
- Office Productivity Tools
I will try to add more suggestions to this list in the near future. Happy computing!
I worked small-ish non-profit for almost 7 years before coming to Compassion, and we extensively used OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird, (Fedora) Linux, and other free software with excellent results. We saved lots of money while maintaining high security and productivity.
ReplyDeleteIn general, I highly recommend the above mentioned programs, and I continue using them at home and at my church.
There is no such thing as perfect software. Some people think OpenOffice.org should be inferior to Microsoft Office because OpenOffice.org is free. That's not true. After using both for so many years, I cannot say which is better overall. Each has its strengths. For example, OpenOffice.org is great at making PDFs and has a more intuitive, well-designed user interface.
Abiword is too lightweight for my taste, but it could be nice for people with slow computers.
While at my old job our only antivirus protection on Windows was ClamWin, I generally do not recommend ClamWin for Windows machines. ClamWin does not have real-time scanning, so it provides little protection. It was mostly a miracle (like the Passover) my previous employer was not infected with more than 1 virus in all those years. For home users on Windows, I recommend AVG Grisoft antivirus. It's free only for home use, and it seems more reliable than Symantec, which I've seen fail spontaneously.