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ERP/CMS for Small Business IT consultants

Posted by Cliff on

Serge asks: "In my IT-consultancy-network-engineer job, where I visit several small business customers, I've been looking for some software to extensively manage resources I have on our customers. Currently, the system sucks. We write reports in Microsoft Word, draw network schemes in Visio, export offers to PDF, and so on, and stack it all together on a nice Windows file server in a per customer directory structure. So much for the automation aspect of Information Technology. My ideal app would be accessible online and offline (I travel with my laptop), I would document a log on every network object I work on, I could pull a query on all those logs from one day to give a daily report to the customer, I could input my working hours to bill later on, it would be integrated with our helpdesk software and would manage each customer's to-do list. The sky is the obviously limit. So, what does Slashdot do to fully handle this information ERP issue?"

3 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Compiere by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://www.compiere.org/

    Might need some tweaking.

  2. Not available offline, but... by Acorsys · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've been using a great product called http://www.basecamphq.com/Basecamp. its only available on the web, but it allows collaboration, file uploading, and lots of features. There's also a company called Guavasoft that is developing an open source ERP suite similar to Compiere, only not just CRM and its a web-application. Kind of like salesforce.com but expanded.

    --
    "Rhetoric can't raise the dead, I'm sick of always talking when there's no change." - Thrice
  3. Re:Mixed up by La+Camiseta · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, if you're looking for a CMS (content management system), then you probably should have looked through the recent archives of Ask Slashdot (http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/18/0 043234&tid=169).

    And then if you're looking for an open-sourced ERP/CMS, Google can be your best friend. (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=fir efox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=open+s ource+erp&btnG=Search, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=fire fox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=open+so urce+crm&btnG=Search).

    The only one that seems to intersect both is Compiere, but that requires an Oracle license.

    Of course, if what you're doing is just contracting, I'd just look at some good CRM software, like here (http://java-source.net/open-source/erp-crm).