How can Skype help you save money and be more productive with just a broadband connection:

• Two users use skype via their P.C.’s and it costs you nothing.
• Ideal for conference calls with other skype users via a broadband connection.
• More secure than many other services for instant messaging.
• Easy to set when your available and see when colleagues are available.

Then you have the nifty features that cost money:

• You can assign telephone numbers from different countries and regions to a skype account.You can have more than one number on one skype account.
• You can have an answer service.
• You can pay for devices to use skype through. E.g. A wireless skype phone for 802.11b networks. Skype on a mobile phone or even a usb phone if you don’t want to use a headset on your laptop or desktop.
• They have calling packages also.

Visit Skype to find out more: www.skype.com

Feel free to ask questions, give recommends or feedback.

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Thunderbird is an excellent email client that many use instead of Microsoft Outlook. It has a great selection of addons that can further expand its functionality and features. Suggested addons: Contacts sidebar, Foxclocks and Ligthning. These give you better management of contacts, world clocks and calendar functionality.

Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/

The mature and very usable Open Office suite of packages is a fantastic alternative to Microsoft Office. Providing functionality and features that go beyond most small business requirements. It can also export to Microsoft Word, Excel and PDF formats among others.

Scribus http://www.scribus.net/

An excellent desktop publishing package ideal for any startup to quickly and cheaply produce leaflets and posters.

Dia http://live.gnome.org/Dia

A nice nifty application to help you draw your diagrams. Ideal for great flow charts etc and exports to various graphics formats. Easy to incorporate into your other work if required.

Gimp http://www.gimp.org/

Although I’ve not spent much time with it, I’ve found it ideal to quickly edit graphics. Many obviously perfer Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. However as it doesn’t cost anything and has quite a few features it is more than enough for a lot of small businesses.

Skype http://www.skype.com/

The popular VoIP service. Ideal for business colleagues working in different locations to reduce overheads for instance. Has conference call features and more. I’ve used this for years and always have been impressed by the quality of calls and features you get for free. You can then decide whether you want to pay for extra features such as calling non-skype users, have an answer phone or even a phone number assigned to your skype account. Well worth a look.

Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Firefox for many is a great alternative to Internet Explorer. The tab browsing, impressive amount of regular updates, addons, correctly displaying html code etc has made this a popular browser.

FileZilla http://filezilla-project.org/

For those who require regular ftp access to a server, FileZilla is a great ftp client. It also is regular updated, easy to use with drag and drop features, site manager among other features.

If you know of a free application that is ideal for small businesses to run on both Linux and Windows, please tell us!

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