BOSSIEs You Might Like!

While tracking down a utility, I noticed the developer had a BOSSIE award banner prominently displayed on the website.

Normally I don’t judge by awards alone, but I hadn’t heard of this and as it was associated with InfoWorld, I thought I would check it out.

InfoWorld Bossie Awards – InfoWorld

InfoWorld Bossies (Best of Open Source Software)

Each year, InfoWorld's Bossies (Best of Open Source Software awards) recognize the best open source software for business. The InfoWorld Test Center's central mission has always been to identify the most promising and cost-effective products available to IT organizations. Increasingly, those products -- from application development tools to platforms and infrastructure software to CRM and ERP applications -- come from the open source camp.

Two years running (2007 & 2008), the 2009 winners will be announced August 3, 2009.

I used the Infoworld Bossie Awards as listed on Wikipedia to do my rapid-scans looking for any nice/new tools or software packages.  Or you can look at the 2008 InfoWorld Bossies and 2007 InfoWorld Bossies official pages for a bit more info on why the winners were selected.

So here were the ones I am highlighting as particular interest to me:

• Intalio, The Enterprise Cloud Company » Community Edition – A business process management software solution.  Much more highly geared to developing and documenting complex business processes than Word and Visio.

• Drools : Business Logic integration Platform - “Drools 5 introduces the Business Logic integration Platform which provides a unified and integrated platform for Rules, Workflow and Event Processing.”
  Oohhh!  As a process and procedure documentarian for our IT group I’m salivating at the thought of what these tools might offer!

• inSSIDer – MetaGeek – This wonderful Wi-Fi network scanner is positively awesome. I installed in on my Win7 (x64) laptop and in no-time was monitoring and observing over 8 wireless access points around our home.  If I can have this much info at home, I can’t wait to see how useful it will be to do Wi-Fi policy auditing at work.
  The following related items aren’t BOSSIES but seemed appropriate to place here for the curious.
  • WirelessNetView – No-install NirSoft utility to monitor and find wireless networks.

  • NetStumbler – One of the leading tools to monitor and audit Wi-Fi networks.

  • Using Wireless Network Audit Techniques – 2004 article by Michael T. Hoesing at the ISACA website.  Good intro to some basic info.

  • Wireless Security 802.11  - Wirelessdefence.org “A Wireless LAN (WLAN) security site provided for 802.11 (aka Wireless, aka WI-FI) - Security Auditors and Penetration Testers.”  Tons of good info here.

• dotproject - Open Source Project and Task Management Software – clearly one of the best “free” alternatives to Microsoft Project.

• Puppy Linux – When I was prepping Alvis’s old Linux desktop to donate to our church fundraiser project I needed a light but featured OS to install on it.  She had been using PCLinuxOS but the latest version didn’t support the older hardware any longer.  So I turned to Puppy Linux.  In under an hour I had it downloaded, installed and configured.  It can breath new life into very old computer hardware.

• WinMerge - “WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.”

Take a look a these as well as the full list of 207 & 2006 Bossie winners to see what else might strike your fancy.

There are lots and lots of other categories and winners.

I can’t wait to see what next week offers for the 2009 winners!

Claus V.