Feng Office is a great business management tool for small businesses. The open source solution can track time and manage projects, documents, knowledge, and tasks.
Business management tools usually cost a pretty penny. One business management tool that won't break your budget is Feng Office, which is licensed under the open source license.
Although Feng Office does not offer all the bells and whistles as some of the costly proprietary options, it can still fulfill the needs of a small business that needs a software solution for tracking time and managing projects, documents, knowledge, and tasks.
Feng Office comes with these tools:
- Daily overview
- Email integration (email server must be set up separately)
- Tasks
- Notes
- Time
- Calendar
- Reporting
Each tool is well integrated with one another. The linking of objects to and from these tools makes Feng Office an incredibly powerful and useful suite for small businesses.
Requirements
Hardware
- CPU: Pentium 4 or better
- 512MB RAM or higher
- Operating system: Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows
Software
- PHP 5.0+
- MySQL 4.1+ with InnoDB
- Apache HTTP Server 2.0+
InnoDB engine should be installed and enabled by default. If it is not, you should look at the /etc/mysql/my.cnf and enable (or add) the following directives:
default-storage-engine=innodb default-table-type=innodb
If you have to make these changes, you should restart the MySQL service.
Installation instructions
Step 1: Download the latest Feng Office source file from SourceForge. After you download the file, move the file to the document root of your web server (/var/www/ for Apache2). Step 2: Unpack the zip file and make a change to a sub-folder permissions. To do this, follow these steps:- Open a terminal window.
- Change to the document root where the fengoffice_XXX.zip file is saved (XXX is the release number).
- Issue the command sudo unzip fengoffice_XXX.zip (XXX is the release number).
- Change into the newly created fengoffice directory and issue the command sudo chmod ugo+w config.
Add modules
The full list of modules is not available by default. To add the remaining modules, follow these steps:
- Click the Settings icon in the top right corner (next to your user name).
- Click Administration from the drop-down menu.
- Click the Tabs icon.
- From the list of possible panels, select what you want to add.
- Click Save Changes.
It's time to start setting up the various tools you plan to use. For example, to add an email account, go to the Mail tab and click Add Email Account. You can set up either POP or IMAP accounts (sorry, no connection to Exchange is available).
More to come
In my next post, I'll discuss the ins and outs of using this management system. Until then, you should get Feng Office set up for your business, and then poke around and become familiar with the layout.