Take your office with you…

Due to our office move and new site launch we didn’t get around to making any Open Source recommendations last month. To make up for it we will squeeze in two this month.

So far our recommendations have been desktop focused and primarily for the Mac (we are all Mac users at toggle). The Open Source movement extends way beyond desktop software and the Open Source business model is being adopted in some very unexpected places. Open Source cola, Open Source hardware and more recently an Open Source car.

A shift is occurring in the way we use technology and store our data, the shift is driven by the web and is moving the software we use online. The huge advantage to this is that our data follows us to any device we happen to be using. With this in mind we felt it was time to start looking at some of the best Open Source web applications.

OpenGoo

The sales pitch:

OpenGoo is an Open Source Web Office. It is a complete solution for every organisation to create, collaborate, share and publish all its internal and external documents.

In short, OpenGoo is a strong alternative to Google Docs, Zoho and Microsoft Office on the desktop. What really impresses us with OpenGoo is the amount of features available in the application. OpenGoo allows you to manage:

• Text documents
• Presentations
• Task Lists
• E-mails
• Calendars
• Web Links
• Contacts

From the looks of it they have more features on the way too. The application is the long lost cousin of ActiveCollab (a now commercial project) that we used to make use of in the early days of toggle. Essentially it is a mashup of many different Open Source projects rolled into one neat package.

We don’t make use of OpenGoo at toggle (yet) – we would need to have mobile access before jumping on board. OpenGoo could also be improved with cleaner interface, especially if our clients are going to be collaborating on documents with us. Playing with the demo we were really impressed and we will certainly be keeping a close eye on the projects future developments.