Millions of People Help You Communicate with Your Customers

I would like to tell you that there are millions of people convincing your customers on your behalf. But we are not discussing viral marketing here. I am talking about how there is a community of millions of developers who put in their time to make free products for you, products that help you communicate with your customers through your website, (IP) telephone, and email. Open source gives you a full suite of communication tools. It is time to realize it.

Showing off with a great Website – Joomla! and Drupal

Before reading this item, you should consider how much of a geek you are. If you consider yourself a true geek: program something for yourself. If you are a half-geek: go for Drupal. And if you just like things that work, check out Joomla!. Joomla!'s greatest strengths are its easy plain spoken administration and its tremendous library of beautiful templates, making the creation of professional looking web-pages a breeze for any business that can play within its limits.

Both of the systems have thriving communities and the number of plug-ins and add-ons is so large that you can find something for every need. The communities are also very helpful when it comes to helping out both the beginners and the more complicated issues such as SEO and performance.

Making the call – Asterisk PBX

Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephone server. Powering countless businesses, PBX providers and VoIP operators around the world, it puts the power of a $100K PBX/VoIP solution into the hands of anyone who has the guts to install and figure it out. Anything the world-class PBX system used by the big businesses can do, Asterisk can do better. With everything from advanced call handling, call-center functionality, smart queuing, and interactive automated voice prompts, even the smallest business can bother users with endless “press one for” choices. Although traditionally a tough setup, applications like FreePBX and TrixBox have made it a lot easier for those of us with a little engineer inside us. It also does a great job of bridging the world of VOIP and regular lines to help businesses make the transition from physical to virtual phones.

The good ol’ email – RoundCube Webmail

There are endless other possibilities to employ open source software. For example, it might be far-fetched that a startup hosts its own online email client, but 10,115 weekly downloads for RoundCube show that it is a very popular option indeed, and the downloads are growing, even after being released almost a year ago.

The latter comment just goes to show you that open source products are like good wine, they get better with time. And given the millions of developers working on open source day and night, time goes fast. We at Office123 also commit some improvements back to the open source community whenever we can. As we integrate the above products to our business suite we introduce many improvements that we are happy to share with the community. After all, it was the community that has been so successful at creating these great products that small businesses can use to set up their communication line to the customer and, eventually, sales.

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