InfoWorld's top picks in open source business apps, from back office to Web presence The best open source applications All the three-letter acronyms are represented here, as are the important two- and four-letter acronyms: CRM, ERP, BI, BPM, CMS, ECMS, and even EMR, thanks to an open source standout for managing health care practices and electronic medical records. Of course, you’ll also find options for e-commerce, collaboration, social networking, small-business accounting, and personal finance — so many great open source apps to choose from! vTiger A fork of SugarCRM, vTiger is a powerful CRM with a host of features. There’s only one edition, which is free and open source. In addition to the standard CRM capabilities, it includes what would be considered premium features in other CRM apps: sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, asset tracking, SMS notification, PBX manager, customer portal, mobile access, and workflows, to name a few. The community is large and active, and there’s a lot of good documentation, plenty of third-party add-ons, and a new project called Tigress for making modifications without requiring code change. An inexpensive hosted version and third-party integration with Front Accounting are also available. — Fred Blauer Pentaho Pentaho is a mature business intelligence product that has proven itself in large organizations. It comes in a free community version or a premium enterprise version that has more capabilities and easier ways to accomplish certain tasks, such as creating SQL queries. Both editions include different components for ETL/integration, OLAP repositories, and analytics/visualization, each a system in itself. Pentaho is the tool of choice for many of the integrated open source ERP systems. For instance, ERP BI Solutions combines Pentaho with xTuple to produce very nice analytics and dashboards without a lot of effort. — Fred Blauer Bonita Open Solution Bonita Open Solution shines brightest in open source BPM with a coding-free BPM design studio, a large stock of connectors (databases, CRM, messaging), a whiteboard-style process modeler, a good widget-based forms builder, and a standout transaction engine, which received a performance boost this year. Built-in process simulation tools ease the way to process optimization. A favorite feature is Bonita’s decision tables, which simplify the integration of business rules into workflows. (There’s a harness to wire external rules engines like Drools too.) Custom dashboards and KPIs require a subscription, but BERT is bundled for basic reporting, and the one-click application generator can’t be beat. — James R. Borck Open SourceSoftware Development