I recommend this book highly to anyone who is looking to the open source market to reduce costs without losing robustness and performance. Open source software presents easy and powerful solutions at a fraction of the cost, becoming a real business solution. Unfortunately, these solutions are relatively unknown to most small businesses, and even those that are medium-sized or larger. First, you must know that open source or “free software” doesn’t necessarily mean “no cost.” “Free” translates to freedom, not “gratis,” and means the freedom to copy, change, or distribute the software under clear and simple rules, namely the GPL license, a public license supported by the Free Software Foundation. Open software is, as a consequence, very cheap, almost free, in the economic sense, because the source code is public and available without cost.

This book provides a solid introduction to using open source software for business, including Linux implementation, or migration from other, private, licensed operating systems. The author has a strong fundamental grasp of what business is; he describes business and e-business in six interlocking categories: enterprise applications, internal and external integration, business and consumer e-commerce, and how open source software can be used. The author also seems to have a good grasp of the state of open source, and of what types of decisions technical folks need to make when evaluating software.

The book is written at many technical and nontechnical levels, but it is really more for managers than developers. There are some innovative chapters. I was glad to see some topics covered that are dismissed in other books, for example enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), Web content, intranets, electronic documents management, and electronic commerce. I would have liked to see a section covering electronic billing presentment and payment (EBPP), a feature becoming more and more of a necessity for small businesses, and a cost reduction feature for any enterprise (and, of course, also a very important CRM strategy).

Ninety percent of companies in the US qualify as small businesses, and this number is similar in Canada. In Mexico, more than 90 percent are cataloged as small businesses, and there is no software available to solve their businesses requirements. Often, this “must have for daily operation” software is really expensive for these enterprises, or simply doesn’t fit their expectations, just because it is designed for other kinds of enterprises. There is an unbridged gap for those that cannot get commercial software. That market can begin to consider the new open source software. This book explores the operational issues that most businesses share, emphasizing that open source software is now offering very interesting solutions at a fraction of the price of the existing expensive software used by many companies (for example, database servers or applications servers).

This book identifies good open source software that can help businesses solve common problems and needs, and compares it to its proprietary counterparts. It is a good book for readers interested in finding out what this whole open source and Linux thing is, and how to go about using it inside a production environment, including key business issues. The book fills a very broad gap for the nontechnical person who wants to know about open source products, and how they can be beneficial. This is not a technical manual, but a guide that offers a higher-level view of what the software can do, and how to use it.

The book includes information on obtaining and installing a Linux distribution, and on setting up an office network, an email server, a Web server, a CRM solution, calendar and schedule management, document management, accounting, project management, security, and other packages. In the book, readers will learn about OpenOffice.org as a replacement for Microsoft’s Office, MySQL or Postgress as an alternative to Microsoft Access or other relational database management systems (RDBMS), how to chose many other valuable business solutions, and common issues such as e-mail, Web servers, and document management.

The book includes a CD that contains many open source packages for Windows. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include programs for Linux or other operating systems. Fortunately, the book points to sites where readers can download them. I think readers may prefer to visit the Web site for the specific packages, and download the latest.