Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Free WebOffice Alternative

As much as I like Webex, WebOffice.Com is total crap. But don’t despair, I just found perfect Webex WebOffice replacement and it happens to be free. Boys and girls, meet Bitrix24.
Bitrix24 comes in three big parts. First come group communication tools – videocalls, video conferences, group chat, IP telephony and so on. The second big part is intranet, or social intranet, to be exact. This means you have company directory, dynamic organizational chart, intranet workgroups, private and shared calendars, enterprise social network compete with activity stream, company media gallery, discussions, announcements and so on. The social part is likes, tags, following, badges and so on. The third part is the most important – tools. And this is where Bitrix24 beats WebOffice hands down.
 
CRM
WebOffice doesn’t even offer one, just contacts list. Bitrix24 gives you a complete CRM with sales funnel, invoices, flexible access rights, send&save email integration and so on. CRM in Bitrix24 is accessible via mobile app too. In fact, it’s a fully functional free mobile CRM.
 
Collaboration
Bitrix24 comes with a number of collaboration, idea management and knowledge management tools (like wiki, polls or knowledge base, for example). Document management is excellent – you get simultaneous multiuser editing, version history, private and share documents, file sharing platform (including ability to share files with outside your network), network drive mapping, Bitrix24.Drive that makes a good Dropbox alternative. The best thing is that you don’t need MS Office Suite or any office suite installed in order to work with documents in Bitrix24.
 
Project Management
While all you get from WebOffice.com is  tasks, Bitrix24 gives you projects (workgroups), tasks, recurring tasks, checklists, Gantt charts, work reports, time management. Importantly, Bitrix24 offers extranet support for working with people who aren’t part of your company (like consultants, vendors, partners, clients and so on).
 
HR Tools
Another place where WebOffice loses to competitors. With Bitrix24 you get HRIS, leave management, HR forms, employee engagement tools, employee self service portal and other goodies.
Now let me repeat – all of this is free for any company that has up to 12 employees. And after that it’s $99 a month for unlimited users. And if you don’t want to use the cloud service and host Bitrix24 on your own server – the self hosted version of Bitrix24 is $2,299.  Not bad at all. It’s been nice knowing you, WebOffice