Technology Alternatives for Your Business

In today's competitive business world, it is important for businesses to gain any advantages that they can over their competitors. One way that a business can gain this advantage is through the use of technology to simplify the way they do business. Business' must carefully way all of their technological options and choose the option that best suits their needs. This paper will focus on three possible technology alternatives that a business should consider.

Open Source Software

Open source software is a term used for any software that can be used free of charge. In the past, the software has usually been hard to use and much less robust than its paid for counterparts. This is no longer the case, as there are several open source software packages on the market that have joined the ranks of their paid cousins.

The biggest benefit of software is the price. Most of the software can be purchased very cheaply (the cost of the disks and handling charges) or can be downloaded from the Internet. A second price benefit is in the service plan. Service plans can be purchased for when support is needed for the software. If the users are fairly computer literate, these service plans can be eliminated and the users can research their problems on the Internet.

While there are cost benefits to using open source software, there can also be some negative items when using open source. A lot of open source software is not completely compatible with its commercial counterparts. This lack of compatibility can cause problems when trying to share documents with people outside of your company. This problem can be mitigated somewhat by carefully choosing the options of commercial software that are used and by saving documents back to plain text when necessary.

It is recommended that a combination of open source and commercial software be used in this case. For the operating system, it is recommended that Microsoft Windows XP Corporate edition be the standard software. For a file and print server, it is recommended that Linux open source server be used. While slightly more difficult to set up, the cost difference between Microsoft Small Business Server is approximately $600. For word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations it is recommended to use the latest version of OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org. The reviews on this version of the software have it working well with other document formats (Svensson, 2005). Using OpenOffice is expected to save approximately $400 per user.

Web Hosting

Being that the goal is to create an e-business, where to host the web site must be decided. There are pros and cons to hosting the site with external providers versus internal. If the site is hosted internally, the business must have someone able to support the necessary servers and they must purchase or lease all of the equipment. On the other hand, if the site is hosted externally there is only the fee paid to the provider. This fee however is usually much less than the cost of purchasing the hardware and having someone maintain the server. These companies also are usually connected to multiple Internet backbones in order to have redundant connections to the Internet.

Since our business is small, it is recommended that we use a hosting provider to host our website. 1&1 has several levels of packages available starting at only $4.99 per month (www.1and1.com, 2005). We can purchase a smaller package to start the site and then upgrade our service level as needed in the future. It is important that the web provider be able to provide at least 99% uptime on whatever hosting package that we need. It is recommended to start with their business hosting package that runs $9.99 per month until we have the initial website created and our business started. After that, it is recommended that we upgrade to a managed server package for $79.00 per month. This package provides us a dedicated server that does not share resources with any other customers. The server size is more than adequate for our needs and the transfer allowances should be adequate as well.

Faxing Needs

Even with the popular use of email, every business needs to send and receive faxes at some point or another. A company has several options on how to set up their offices with faxing capabilities. The first option is to provide a phone line and a stand alone fax machine in order to receive the faxes. A second option is a phone line and fax software on a computer equipped with a fax modem. A third option would be to outsource the faxing to a fax service provider such as eFax. Each of these options has advantages and each had disadvantages for the company.

Both the first and second option require a company to invest in at least one additional phone line in order to avoid tying up their primary phone lines. Additional phone lines can be somewhat expensive, but they provide the fax capabilities that most people are familiar with. Simple stand alone fax machines start at approximately $100 and can go up to several thousand dollars depending on the needs of the company. Some small companies can get by with only one fax machine. For these companies, a computer with a fax modem is a possible solution. Many of these solutions are not convenient though if more than one person needs access to the received faxes or need to send faxes. A person can buy a fax modem for their PC for approximately $40.

An additional option for businesses is to use eFax. eFax provides its customers with a fax phone number that is local to their area. All faxes are received and stored in a digital format that is then accessed via their software. While the fax is stored in a proprietary format, anyone can download the viewer and it is possible to convert it to another format. The faxes can also be emailed to various users in the company depending how accounts are set up. According to its website, eFax costs approximately $10.50 per month for each fax number and then about 10 cents per page for inbound and outbound faxes. (eFax.com, 2005).

Because we are primarily an e-business and expect to do most of our communications through email and phone, it is recommended that eFax be implemented for this company. While there is a monthly fee and a per page fee, for the small amount of faxing that will be done it is less expensive than a separate phone line. eFax also allows for future expansion while still giving employees access to the faxes while limiting the number of phone lines that are needed for the company.

Conclusion

When starting and running a business, there are many choices that must be considered. Whenever a decision can provide an advantage over a competitor, this option should be exercised. In this situation, it is recommended to use primarily open source software (except for the desktop operating systems), host the company website externally with a well-known provider, and finally to implement eFax in order to minimize the costs associated with faxing.

References:

(n.d.). Retrieved May. 11, 2005, from www.efax.com Web site: www.efax.com.

(n.d.). Retrieved May. 11, 2005, from www.1and1.com Web site: www.1and1.com.

Svensson, P. (2005). Review: openoffice, a free alternative to microsoft suite, matches all but the e-mail. Retrieved May. 11, 2005, from ABC News Web site: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=744239&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312.