What Business Software Runs Your Office?

bardkerbie asks: "I work as a webmaster and sysadmin for a small computer services shop (4 employees including the owner). We're to a point in the growth of our business where we need a system for tracking work orders as they come in and out of the shop, specifically inventory used and time spent. We use Quickbooks Pro 2006 for our accounting and payroll software. I've played around with a number of issue-tracking and CRM suites, including Bugzilla, Eventum, SugarCRM and vTiger, but all seem like they lack one critical piece to handle the workload we have. What do you use for tracking the work you do? Is it something you wrote yourself? Is there an open-source project that works well, or is there a Quickbooks plug-in we can purchase?"

Re:What platform?

[sakdoctor]

I run a much smaller business and our office is running ubuntu. We have a server which was originally random cobbled together hardware but has been replaced by a proper server.
The main applications are LAMP based and I wrote them myself originally, although they have been extended quite a bit since then.
Any of the growing number of thin clients can access our database through the LAN.

At the moment not having to pay for software licences, and being able to add new clients at the low cost of just a mobo, RAM, input devices and LCD screen IS a big deal for us, but later down the line this setup should have other advantages too.

Re:Try RT

[fimbulvetr]

Easy to use and and setup? Have you seen the dependency list? Have you installed it? Have you admin'd it? It's a nightmare to setup, it's an ongoing battle to keep it setup correctly (read: high maintenance) and it has so many weird and obtuse requirements you'll can really use the box it's setup on for anything else.

Outside of that it's a good program, but it's anything but easy to setup.