Cutting IT Costs for Home and Small Businesses

January 17th, 2010 | by admin |

Yes, that’s my office, and my, um, secretary.

I own a small business which requires computers, and we have some personal computers at home, so software is a substantial investment around our house. Forget the actual machines themselves—don’t scratch those disks people, a computer can be easily replaced but oh, the software!

I’ve bootstrapped my little business along with the version of Office from 2002 that I already owned on my newer work computer and have decided that it really wasn’t going to work. It was crashing several times a day and loosing data occasionally. Disagreements between older and newer software was crippling my productivity and causing every imaginable error, but only on my deadlines. I’d been dreading it for months, but as I sat down to prepare my 2010 budget, I knew software had to be part of it.

I penciled out my budget (combined home and business) and had about $2,000 in software upgrades—from anti virus renewal, to a new Office suite for business (I wasn’t planning to upgrade the 2 home computers) plus the child-safety software for our daughter’s machine.

Ultimately, I consulted experts. That’s right, by experts, I mean Twitter. I poked around for alternatives and found people using Google Documents and Open Office as an alternative to the expensive Office Suite. A friend of mine works as a music teacher and travels between a studio and student’s homes. He’s found that Google Documents fits the bill for him because it acts as his file server. I work with legal documents and wanted to keep everything off-line and secured on my machine, so I choose to use Open Office. I also don’t want to rely on the Internet connection for productivity.

I easily converted all of my previous files to Open Office files, and kept .doc and .xls copies.

The only solution that wasn’t available to me as an alternative to Outlook and I’ve managed to get Windows Mail to fit that bill (it was built into my computer). (If anyone knows something better, I’m all ears!) I’m using Google’s calendar which syncs nicely with my Blackberry.

We subscribe to a software for monitoring the kids’ use and filtering for safety called “Safe Eyes” which is an excellent program, but at $50 a year, I’d love to reduce that cost too. A friend introduced me to to a free program called “McGruff Safeguard” which meets our needs for free!

I’ll still annually renew my Norton subscription, but now we can run three machines indefinitely at the cost of only the annual anti-virus renewals. Ok, yes, I realize a possible change of operating system or upgrade of Windows may be down the road somewhere… but I’m not ready to think that far ahead just yet.

If you’d like to try the transition as well, (or already have) I’d love to hear how it’s going for you at home or at work.

If you would like to try Google Documents you can reach that from the Google home page. Google Documents is free “cloud” software which meets most of your normal office suite functions. If you would like to try Open Office, you can find it at www.openoffice.org. It also has a program comparable to each office task including word processing, presentations, spreadsheets and databases. It’s a free download and very simple to install and convert your files.

Oh, and as for the $2,000 I saved. It’s going on my debt snowball—that’s an extra $2k in profit!

Also, an update, for those wondering how I’m doing on my 2010 goal: I haven’t made my snowball payments yet for January, but I am down ten pounds so far!

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