Stories about: OpenOffice

A recent study of Web browser installations showed that far too few are up to date with the latest security patches. And browsers aren't alone; as my dear old mum can attest, it can be hard to keep up with OS and application patches when all you want to do is use your computer for work. It should come as no surprise that many PCs are vulnerable to security exploits that could otherwise be prevented.

SourceForge.net's annual Community Choice Awards, designed to honor open source software projects in a variety of categories, have concluded. This year's awards were open to any open source projects, not just ones that were hosted on SourceForge.net, so they promised to be an accurate representation of the entire field.

Proprietary software vendors, movie companies and the music industry aren't the only businesses that don't like pirates stealing, copying and reselling their CDs and DVDs.

In case you haven't noticed, the economy is collapsing.

Have you ever experienced a software bug and thought to yourself, "I could fix that"? If you could, would you? How could that even be possible?

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

There are few pieces of software that users touch more often than office productivity suites. The market monster is, of course, Microsoft Office, with the lion's share of all licenses for office productivity tools. But two trends -- open source and cloud computing -- are offering a new generation of Office alternatives that businesses may want to consider.

Open source and cloud computing alternatives can replace Office in some circumstances

We know your company uses open-source applications. We also know many of you already have an open-source policy. Sort of. As CIO.com discovered when researching the adoption of open-source in enterprise IT, a quarter of respondents have a formal policy in place to control how such software is chosen, supported and deployed. Another 18 per cent expected to adopt such a policy in the next 12 months. But those who have some kind of policy aren't necessarily thrilled with it; just 45 per cent said their policies are very effective.

It's not uncommon to use more than one computer during the course of a week: a Mac at work, a PC at home and a laptop on the road. When people search for applications that will work across all platforms, many look for an open-source solution first, only to discover that apps that work on Windows are woefully underdeveloped for the Mac.

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in the US. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.