Ten open-source tools worth trying

The world of open-source software teems with interesting initiatives, but some projects stand out from the crowd, says Jack Wallen.

Of the thousands of open-source projects, you may be wondering how many are worth tracking. If you remove the usual suspects, you can pare down the list to a number that really merit closer inspection.

1. Openbravo
If you are looking for your next ERP application, do not overlook Openbravo. This tool is a small-footprint powerhouse that includes integrated accounting, sales and CRM, procurement, inventory, production, and project and service management.

Openbravo also features single-instance to multiple tenants, organisations, localisations and warehouses. It is every ERP tool you will need in one open-source toolbox.

If just want to evaluate it, you can try a virtual machine with Openbravo. But to download a package, you will have to walk through a questionnaire. Warning: someone might try to sell you something.

2. OpenNMS
OpenNMS a serious network management platform that offers three main areas: service polling, data collection, and event and notification management. Its features are impressive and include node listing, searches, outages, path outages, events, alarms, surveillance and distributed status.

If you need to be convinced about this product, visit the OpenNMS Demo page and see what this tool is all about. OpenNMS will run on Linux, Solaris, OS X and Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003.

3. Elgg
Elgg is an open-source social-networking platform that powers numerous social-networking sites. As many companies start to offer in-house social networking, you would do well to invest some time in this open-source project.

The Elgg social-networking platform offers profiles, notifications, groups, blogs, embedded media, files, microblogging, pages, external pages and more. If you are looking for a means to improve your company morale but do not want users logging on to Facebook or MySpace, try this open-source social- networking platform.

4. Magento
Magento is a serious e-commerce tool. This software can stand up with the big-boy platforms, and knock some of them down. It features marketing and promotion tools, site management, analytics and reporting, catalogue management, catalogue browsing, product browsing, mobile solutions, checkout, shipping, payment and more.

Magento was voted Best New Project on SourceForge in 2008 for a reason. With community and enterprise editions, there is a version for everyone. The Community edition is free and lacks numerous features. The Enterprise edition does have a steep price tag of $8,900 (£5,600) per year.

5. DotProject
DotProject is a web-based project management tool that offers features ranging from user management, trouble-ticket system — integrated Voxel.net Ticketsmith — client and company management, project listings, hierarchical task lists, file repository, contact lists, calendar, forum and a permission system.

What stands out with DotProject is its clean and simple user interface.

6. Heartbeat
Heartbeat is the heart of the Linux High Availability (HA) project. It is the piece of the HA project that performs death-of-node detection, communications and cluster management.

Heartbeat is a daemon that provides the cluster infrastructure so peer machines will know the status of all cluster resources. Of course, Heartbeat is not much good without a cluster resource manager (CRM).

Since Heartbeat is a part of the HA project, you can be sure there is a CRM tool. Although Heartbeat...