Application Options

[Lynn Day]

What open source or inexpensive applications are you using in your district? Do you have an application that you just can't live without? Have you discovered any new applications lately?

As a follow up to a discussion we started at the May 20 Tech Coordinators, meeting, post your new, fun, exciting, free, or inexpensive but useful applications here!

As a start, here's some of the applications we talked about at the meeting. Descriptions of these applications can be found at http://nwtechs.ning.com/forum/topics/may-20-2009

Website Creation and Statistics:
Joomla! - http://www.joomla.org/ - web site creation
Drupal - http://drupal.org/ - web site creation
Woopra - http://www.woopra.com/ - site stats
MachForm - http://www.appnitro.com/ - form and survey creation

Resources and Scheduling
phpScheduleIt - http://www.php.brickhost.com/ - room and resource scheduling

Organization
Evernote - http://evernote.com/ synchronized note taking and to-do list

[Ben Dahlin]

Here are a few open source pieces of software that I use.

Endian Firewall - It does everything I need it to plus more. Port forwarding, one to one NAT, outgoing rules, snort IDS. It does do a little reporting. Some of the other features that it includes that I don't use are - clamav anti-virus, traffic shaping, spam training, content filtering (dansgaurdian)

OpenVPNgui - ssl vpn I use to get into the network remotely. Simple to setup and works great with Endian.

TightVNC – Remote Control software. I prefer this over the realvnc because I can hide the system tray icon.

CamStudio – I send out e-mails to the staff on how to do certain tasks on their computer. I felt that recording my screen with myself talking would get their attention more and would be easier to follow. Camstudio records your screen and then saves it to a .avi. You then can compress them so they are size friendly.

Putty – telnet/ssh client – I mainly use this for configuring network switches.

fileZilla – FTP client. Easy to use. Works great maintaining/updating remote websites.

[Bob Henderson]

Here is a bit I use as well:

Ubuntu Linux: A fantastic alternative to Windows/Mac if your not tied to Microsoft office. Comes preloaded with a wide array of software, from OpenOffice.org, to Firefox, to The Gimp.

VLC Media Player: Great all around media player. I have yet to find a file type it will not play. Good alternative to windows/quicktime.

Tight VNC: Same as above.

VirtualBox: An opensource version of VMWare. Not feature heavy, nor something I'd throw a virtual server on, but works well enough for that one single windows XP program you cant live without while in Linux, Mac, or Vista.