Hey,

Just a quick post this evening on a couple tools that have become part of my daily life. The are OpenOffice.org and Mozilla products (mainly Firefox Browser and Thunderbird Email Client). I just started using both Firefox (for browsing) and Thunderbird for my Email client about a year ago. I’m a very big advocate of Open Source so I felt obligated to give them a try. Sure glad I did.

I’ve become extremely comfortable and happy with both applications. Firefox was a refreshing change for me to browse the Internet (I won’t mention any other names of browsers here that don’t work very well… that seem clunky… and that have the initials IE). Right away I setup Firefox and my default browser and haven’t looked back! I love the multiple tabs options… I find it faster and it’s more secure. All great features. While on the browser topic, another alternative that seems pretty solid, although I haven’t tested it out too much is Opera. Opera is similar to Mozilla… it appears as though they have some neat products on the go… and a great looking website!

Thunderbird is an easy to install email client application that seems as solid as any others I have seen. It’s got a great plugin interface, so you can download plugins from the open source world and include them in your application (calendars, signatures etc etc). Here’s the link to find more from the community. Definitely worth looking at, even just to see what’s out there. You can also download some cool plugins for Firefox here.

OpenOffice… is comparable to Microsoft Office. It has a number of applications included in the suite including OpenOffice Writer (Word Processor), OpenOffice Calc (Spreadsheet Application), Impress (to create PowerPoint presentations) not to mention a number of other applications. I would recommend OpenOffice to any business owner who likes to use free software, that works :) NO Licensing fees… no setup fees… just go to the site, download it, install it and start using it! How refreshing! I still don’t believe that many people in the business world know about OpenOffice. We at Evolving Solutions are trying to promote is much as possible and hopefully over time we can help make a difference and get people on board using it! So, feel free to check it out.. download it and try it out. If you don’t like it, you can always keep paying licensing fees for other software that doesn’t work that great :) .

So, no real technical talk tonight in this post… just me recommending some software that might help you and your business in the long run. The best thing about them both is you can try them out for free, if you don’t like them (which I would be very surprised) you can simply remove them from your computer and carry on.

Cheers,
Adrian