If you haven’t already seen the suite of products at 37 Signals you have to go have a look

We use them to keep an international team all working together

Plus, Go To Meeting is brilliant for online desktop demos and call-ins to conferences for those not on Skype or at a PC

Also, read Common Craft’s blog about their ‘lightweight’ approach – great ways to minimise boring, limiting infrastructure

Good luck with the project – it’s a great initiative

Wayne

But be careful about support. Their support time is worse than a telco.

as for the other things, open source can seem like a winner, and it is *IF* you have the experience using it, and are willing to give up some features that you may never use with a commercial product.

I doubt you will ditch office completely, as excel is still one of the best offerings out there but there are hosting providers that can provide hosted email for you quite reliably. but beware of locking yourself in to those products too.

Some days ago I talked to Xavier Buck, CEO of the Datacenter Group in Luxembourg, which also owns and operates http://www.voipgate.com , a voip provider in Luxembourg (and the rest of the world…).

They are now actively pushing their VOIP solutions with the new generation Nokia mobile phones that support VOIP. This is a smart solution: where ever you have access to a WIFI network, your mobile phone operates as a VOIP device, with almost 0 cost. But it also works in your car or when you’re out fishing at the lake, as a normal cellular phone in that case.

Me thinks this is more universal than relying 100% on Skype.

I’ve just become addicted to using Google Docs for work and for my business. It’s free, it does what you need it to do, and you can access your documents from anywhere. I’d definitely try using it as an alternative to Microsoft office.

And I’m sure you’ve already played with some of the 37 Signals products … some fantastically simple tools to run a business remotely, or at the office.

It’s all headed towards the cloud!

Brilliant! May I recommend Benoît Koch from http://www.versusmind.eu/ as an expert in projects to migrate from Microsoft solutions to equivalent opensource solutions? I have worked with him before and trust his eperience.

Other ways to cut costs in my opinion:

1) usage of netbooks instead of full featured notebooks.
They are powerful enough for all you need – Open Office, Skype, Technical and Development apps. Some people would still need powerful PCs.

2) clouds for hosting, such as:
- Amazon EC2 – http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing
- Google AppEngine for pilot and smaller projects – http://code.google.com/appengine/
Forget about datacentres.

3) Software as Service.
- Gmail Corporate, etc. instead of expensive mail servers
- On-demand CRMs and CMS
Some people may not like an idea of outsourcing company documents and e-mails to Google. In my practice I saw a lot of cases when companies disposed hard drives with sensitive data, ex-employees were taking all documents and sources with them “just in case”, sensitive data was e-mailed to private mailboxes, etc. Keeping ownership of document servers is not a cure against information leaks.
I would like to see quantitative proof of SaS insecurity, not feelings.

4) WordPress for the corporate website

5) Cheaper domain names registration. I’m surprised that some people are still using MelbourneIT and Register.com

6) Offer employees equity instead of cash bonus. That’s especially interesting for private start-up. Everybody wins. Public company shares are not that attractive these days.

7) “Everybody sells” programme – bonuses and rewards for non-sales staff for selling products and bringing prospective clients or partners