TOP 10 TOOLS 2008
Mark Aberdour

Mark is founder and CEO of Kineo Open Source and has over 12 years of technology, open source and team management experience. Mark has worked on learning platform and web technology projects for public and private sector organisations both large and small. He has been an open source enthusiast for over a decade and is passionate about the potential for open source technologies in learning

Mark's Top 10 Tools as at 24 October 2008

1. RSS Owl – there are hundreds of RSS feed readers out there but I have not found many true RSS ‘aggregators’. With RSS Owl you can organise your feeds into directories and aggregate all those feeds into one combined list. I organise my feeds by industry, such as elearning. By aggregating the whole category each morning I get a single news list from all of the top elearning websites and bloggers. Over the last 3 years it has transformed my working life, I’ve got over 500 feeds and they are totally manageable using RSS Owl. It has never been easier or quicker to keep on top of the latest news and thinking in your industry. RSSOwl is open source and highly active with regular new versions and enhancements.

2. MediaWiki – I first installed this on my PC when starting a new job five years ago as a personal note taking system. There is so much information to take in with any new job that a wiki seemed a great choice to collate and organise technical and procedural information. After a few months my colleagues wanted me to give them access to it and within a year it was running on a server for the whole technology team to use. Then other teams saw what we were doing and asked for their own section. It ended up as a knowledge sharing system for the entire company, surpassing the company intranet which by then was a creaking old dinosaur and rarely updated. The local university even sent a placement student to do a case study of our successful corporate wiki. A classic case of bottom up implementation, open source technology at its best.

3. Tracks – I’ve been looking for a decent task tracking tool for years, something with a stylish interface that is easy to use and personalise. I’ve only been using Tracks for a month after it won top spot in a tool review in Linux Format magazine. It essentially provides tool support for David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) productivity methodology, and you’ll need to get used to terms and ideas like contexts and ticklers. Tracks is an open source gem that looks really promising, use the money saved on license fees to buy the GTD book to go with it!

4. Joomla  – my previous experience of managing websites was either hand coding them in PHP or HTML, using the nightmare that is Dreamweaver or clunky home-grown content management systems (CMS). We recently implemented our new company website using Joomla. It’s never been so easy to add entire new site sections, add news items, pages and articles. I love it, a real productivity tool for website management. I’m converting another site into Drupal as we speak which is even more user friendly. Go with an open source CMS, you know it makes sense!

5. Wordpress – I love this tool. As a learning tool well, most of my RSS feeds (see RSS Owl, above) come from Wordpress sites as it’s THE most popular and best blogging software out there. It’s had a huge impact on the learning field in the last 5 years. I tried using a blog for my own personal learning and many do this successfully, but a wiki suited me better. At my last company we used Wordpress for a ‘community liaison’ blog but it got subverted by the marketing team and now basically amounts to a press release system so gets no user comments or interaction. So you really need to choose your content well, but if you want to voice your opinions, build your online social network and start discussions, then this is for you. Again, it’s open source and has a HUGE community so has more addons and plugins that you can shake a stick at.

6. Sugar CRM – a great productivity tool if you are in sales and marketing. Maybe you still use some commercial dinosaur of a CRM system, maybe you still use Salesforce.com. Why? Sugar CRM is an open source version of Salesforce and does the same stuff, and it’s free. It’s a no-brainer. We use Sugar for contact management, opportunity management and send out our newsletter to 6,000 targets using Sugar, but it does so much more besides. It’s open source but it comes in Pro and Enterprise flavours with extra features.

7. Firefox – it’s just a browser I know, but it’s the add-ons that turn it into a true productivity tool. Fireshot allows me to take screengrabs, edit and save them without touching the Prt Scr key or a graphics package. Web developer toolbar allows me to debug websites, especially CSS issues, and run validation tests all within the browser. ShowIP allows me to see the IP address of servers I’m visiting. Foxmarks allows me to synch my bookmarks on my work PC with my home PC. Well, that’s four out of six thousand available add-ons anyway. All made possible through the power of open source (or in geek terms: through the extensibility of an open, modular architecture).

8. Paint.NET  – despite the likes of Fireshot (see above), us non-graphic professionals still need a proper graphics package for various jobs. Photoshop is usually expensive overkill, while GIMP is free but still overkill in my eyes. Paint.NET is a ‘lite’ graphics package, and it does absolutely everything that I ever needed Photoshop for over the past decade. It’s open source and has regular updates. I can’t tell you what the community support is like because I’ve never needed it – it ‘just works’.

9. WampServer - if you do website development you need WampServer. Most open source apps run on Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP), well this little gem gives you a one-click installer (well, near enough) to set up an Apache/PHP/MySQL environment on your Windows PC. It used to take me half a day to setup my development environment properly, now it takes me five minutes, including download time. You can use it on your PC for doing development work, or to setup web applications on your sales team’s laptops or on the demo laptops you take to shows. A marvellous invention, open source and with regular updates when new versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL are released.

10. Moodle– well it doesn’t really need any introduction on this web site, does it? The number one learning management system in the education sector, the small and medium business sector, and soon to be number one in public sector and the enterprise too. At KOS we think it’s gone past tipping point now, and every other LMS will trail in its wake. I was visiting a large multinational last week and I asked the customer why he hadn’t considered any other LMS. He replied that he’d run an induction session for a bunch of new college recruits and he mentioned they were going to buy an LMS and they all said “Why would you want to BUY an LMS? Our colleges all used Moodle and it was great”. So, as an open source LMS service provider, we don’t even have to sell this stuff ourselves any more, how’s that for a productivity tool!