Goodies!
Here are some software we hope you find useful:
7Zip:
An archiving alternative, 7Z also known as 7Zip archive utility is available as open source and is free to use. 7Z is fast, efficient and free. While we like 7Z and we recommend it to everybody who asks for our opinion we do believe that people should have the freedom to choose the archive utility that is right for them. 7Zip.com provides a comparison of what we think are the best seven Zip alternatives.
CoreFTP:
A simple FTP client for Windows. It has features like SFTP (SSH), SSL, TLS, IDN, browser integration, site to site transfers, FTP transfer resume, drag and drop support, file viewing & editing, firewall support, custom commands, FTP URL parsing, command line transfers, filters, and much, much more!
Best of all, there are no popup ads, advertising or spyware and you’re never asked or reminded to register.
FileZilla:
Another free FTP solution. Both a client and a server are available. FileZilla is open source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
ColorfulTabs for Firefox:
A beautiful yet simple add-on that makes a strong colorful appeal. This add-on colors every tab in a different color and makes them easy to distinguish while beautifying the overall appearance of the interface. ColorfulTabs has received various awards.
AxCrypt:
AxCrypt is a leading open source file encryption software for Windows. It integrates seamlessly with Windows to compress, encrypt, decrypt, store, send and work with individual files. After installation, you can right-click on a file or folder and encrypt with a password, image, another file etc. Great for sending sensitive files via email, or through USB flash drives.
Open Office:
Open Office is a leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.
Thinking Rock:
Thinking Rock is a GTD (getting things done) application you can use both at home or at work. It is a very simple, bare bones way to organize and implement tasks with more options and choices than it initially appears have. You will find that Thinking Rock forces you to organize everything correctly following the logical processes of collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing and finally completing the task.
Pentaho Open Business Intelligence Suite:
Pentaho is an open source business intelligence (BI) platform that takes ETL (extract, transform, and load), reporting, data analysis, dashboards, and data mining and pulls them together on top of workflow capabilities to give you an end to end business intelligence suite.
Using Pentaho users can drag, drop and drill into complex data – and easily report findings in different file formats, such as: PDF, excel, plain text and others. Key information from processed data can be presented on dashboards to provide a quick overview of every part of the company. Pentaho is a reliable and enterprise-class product.
PDFCreator:
PDFCreator is an open source printer driver that creates PDF documents. Acting as a printer driver it allows you to create PDF files from any Windows application. The PDF files can then be view with a standard PDF reader (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader). Through it’s option settings security can be added – as well as it allows you to control quality of embedded images. Includes PDF-Encryptor (pdfenc.exe) for both standard 40-bit and 128-bit encryption. PDF-Encryptor, however, is not open source, but only freeware.
DataVision:
DataVision is an open source reporting tool for almost any database available e.g. Access, Oracle, MySql, Information and more. The reports generated can be easily customized in a drag-and-drop user interface. The finished reports can then be either printed directly or exported as pdf, html, xml, latex2e, docbook or csv files. Advanced features include visual table linker, subreports and the ability to embed DataVision into your own applications.
CloneZilla:
Clonezilla is an open source solution to computer backup, restoration and “ghosting”. It is based on partition imaging and allows you to backup and recover your system should it be taken out by a virus or a hard drive crash. Two types are available, the Clonezilla Server Edition (SE) and Clonezilla Live.
jGnash:
jGnash is an open source personal finance manager. It will help you monitor and keep track of your accounts including investments. jGnash can import from Quicken (qif) and GnuCash – and generate reports either for printing or as pdf files. All file data which contains financial information is encrypted to keep it secure from all others than yourself. The look and feel of the user interface can be changed to make you feel more at home. jGnash also support multiple currencies and will automatically update these through the internet. Information on stock prices is also retrieved through the internet.
OpenProj:
OpenProj is a new open source solution for project management. It’s simple user interface is very similar to that of Microsoft Project. OpenProj even let’s you import you existing Microsoft Project files directly, so that you can fast and easily migrate all of you project. Primavera files can also be imported.
The project plan can be viewed as a gantt charts and it also supports network diagrams (PERT charts), WBS and RBS charts.
Postbooks:
PostBooks is an open source business software package that offers a total solution for managing your business, including fully-integrated accounting, CRM and ERP modules. Designed for businesses looking for an alternative to – or a growth path from – commercial desktop accounting packages such as Quickbooks and Peachtree, PostBooks rivals sophisticated commercial ERP platforms, offering higher quality at a much lower cost.
Alfresco:
Alfresco is an open source, less expensive alternative to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. The plentiful ECM (enterprise content management) features of Alfresco rival the more expensive platforms to provide higher quality at a much lower cost.
Alfresco offers document and knowledge management, records and web content management, imaging, collaboration tools and workflow orchestration. These ECM capabilities are all stored in the same scalable repository. This is a distinct advantage over other ECM products, most of which need multiple repositories for support. The repository can replace shared network drives, which pose their own problems.
SugarCRM:
SugarCRM is an open source crm (customer relation management) system, which helps you to track and share opportunities, manage existing customers, keep track of your pipeline and much more. Has offline capability with mobile devices for the salesforce out at customer site, conferences, etc. SugarCRM even integrates to Microsoft Outlook and other groupware systems.
Spybot – Search & Destroy:
Spybot – Search & Destroy detects and removes spyware, a relatively new kind of threat not yet covered by common anti-virus applications. Spyware silently tracks your surfing behavior to create a marketing profile for you that is transmitted without your knowledge to the compilers and sold to advertising companies. If you see new tool bars in your Internet Explorer that you haven’t intentionally installed, if your browser crashes inexplicably, or if your home page has been “hijacked” (or changed without your knowledge), your computer is most probably infected with spyware. Even if you don’t see the symptoms, your computer may be infected, because more and more spyware is emerging. Spybot-S&D is free, so there’s no harm giving it a try to see if something has invaded your computer.
TrueCrypt:
TrueCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP/2000 and Linux. Main Features: creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk, encrypts an entire hard disk partition or a storage device such as USB flash drive. Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
Foxit Reader:
Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.
InfraRecorder:
InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. InfraRecorder is released under GPL version 3.
Virtualbox:
Virtualbox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux and Macintosh hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.
Audacity:
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:
- Record live audio.
- Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
- Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
- Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
- Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
- And more! See the complete list of features.
If you need a basic, yet powerful XML editor, you’ll want to investigate XML Notepad 2007. The user interface features a tree view pane on the left that provides a color-coded view of classes, tags, and values. On the right, the main text editor pane shows all text, which is synchronized and color matched to its associated identifier on the left. You can even customize the colors and choose fonts to your liking. Other features include drag and drop, find and replace, incremental search, instant XML schema validation, a built-in XML Diff tool, and much more. You can learn more about the XML Notepad 2007 Design on MSDN.
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition
If you’re Web site developer at any level, you need to investigate Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. This easy-to-learn, easy-to-use development environment makes it a snap for anyone to create Web sites or small applications. Mainly aimed at the amateur or intermediate-level developers, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition provides professional-level features that will allow you to create a wide variety of Web sites, from the most basic HTML to more advanced ASP.NET pages or SQL Server databases. You can get started by viewing an introductory video that covers the main features of this package and walks you through some of the most common tasks.
Paint.NET started as a computer science project at Washington State University. But it was such a good image and photo editing product (as well as an exceptional example of the .NET Framework technology in action), Microsoft hired the two developers, Rick Brewster and Tom Jackson, and has allowed them to continue improving the application and offering it as a free download. Paint.NET has a great user interface (Figure A) and it’s easy to use. It provides all the essential image editing features you need, plus layers, special effects, and support for a wide range of image formats. Paint.NET also has quite a following on the Internet, and you can find lots of help, tutorials, and plugins — and it supports Windows 7!
Windows 7 supports Windows Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode. However, if you are running Windows Vista or Windows XP, you can still download and use the free Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 package, which will allow you to run multiple operating systems at the same time on the same physical computer. Virtual PC 2007 is easy to install and easy to use.
While you can install your own copies of Windows in Virtual PC 2007, at the time of this writing, Microsoft has several preconfigured VHDs (virtual hard drives) containing sample copies of Windows XP and Windows Vista that you can download and install in Virtual PC 2007 for testing purposes. You can find another Vista evaluation here.
Office Accounting Express 2009
Office Accounting Express is an easy-to-use accounting package that has the familiar Microsoft Office interface and is designed to integrate seamlessly with other Office applications. Providing most accounting features a small business might need, such as managing credit cards, bank accounts, payroll, vendors, invoices, quotes, cash sales, and even built-in PayPal functionality, Office Accounting Express is a great piece of software for business managers.
SQL Server Express 2008 is a slimmed down version of SQL Server, yet it retains all the powerful SQL database features you need for building Web sites and apps. In fact, there are three versions: Express, Express with Tools, and Express with Advanced Services. It’s easy to learn, easy to use, and provides the same advanced database engine as the full fledged editions of SQL Server.
