How To Select A Package - Open Source Clues

By Author: Lee Rixon
Total Articles: 3
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As you are working through the software selection process, you create a needs analysis to act as your benchmark. This basically states what you want from the product and how important each of the desired features are.

The next step is to find products that are potential candidates and determine how well those products fit your needs.

There are endless sources for product information, from promotional material being delivered to your office through to the endless amount of material on the Internet. The trick is to determine what is sales hype and what is verifiable fact, and that can be extremely tricky.

With conventional products, you really have four major sources of information

sales brochures

sales personnel
reference accounts

user groups



For Open Source products, there doesn't tend to be a sales force, so you have to follow a different path. The best sources I've found for Open Source are the forums and the Wiki's. Now you are asking - what the heck are those?

A Wiki is basically a community developed documentation effort, ...
... which tends to be the way documentation is created for Open Source products. To cut a long story short - the documentation is developed by the user and development community.

A forum is a site on the Internet where users and developers communicate about a product.

Both of these give you a good opportunity to get unbiased views on the product in question.

Ok - enough for now - more later......


About the Author Lee is one of the principals at Spinnaker Systems which provides Web related services to the small business owner. Lee can be contacted at lee@spinnakersystems.com and is a regular contributor to the Spinnaker Blog