{"id":2944,"date":"2007-05-24T11:01:55","date_gmt":"2007-05-24T15:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/?p=2944"},"modified":"2012-12-21T14:14:36","modified_gmt":"2012-12-21T19:14:36","slug":"the-best-things-in-life-are-freeware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/archives\/2944","title":{"rendered":"The Best Things In Life Are Free(ware)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best things in life are free, or so Janet Jackson tells us. In the case of communications, Ms. Jackson sings the honest truth. I love freeware<\/a> (that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfree software\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to most of us), and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a thrifty Scottish lass with penny-pinching tendencies.<\/p>\n

For example: your minister wants to put sound bites of him or herself speaking alongside their quotes in news releases. They expect you to do this in-house because your branch has a digital audio recorder, so they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll record and you just toss it on the website, right?<\/p>\n

Wrong. Our standard computers don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have audio editing or mp3 conversion programs, and most budgets don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have room for the cost of professional software. The solution? Audacity<\/a>, popular freeware used by audio-bloggers worldwide. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s safe, easy to use, doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t take up much room on your hard drive and costs nothing.<\/p>\n

The magic of freeware like this is that it is both easy on the budget and it is often open source<\/a>. That means anyone can tweak and extend the program to meet their needs. Once they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve improved the code, those new bits of software become add-ons and voila! A whole new caliber of program evolves, often better than the best money can buy.<\/p>\n

How does freeware apply to government? There are several reasons why the OPS restricts its workforce from being able to download and install executable files \u00e2\u20ac\u201c a lot of freeware comes bundled with spyware<\/a>, adware<\/a> and in a few cases, viruses. Too many security holes and calls to the help desk for unsupported software would wreak havoc on our network; not to mention legal tangles such as warranty disclaimers, limitations of liability and dodgy data collection policies.<\/p>\n

Judiciously used, however, freeware can extend the power of an office \u00e2\u20ac\u201c particularly a communications branch \u00e2\u20ac\u201c far beyond the reach that a tight fiscal budget would normally allow.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not going out on a limb by suggesting this deviation from the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you get what you pay for\u00e2\u20ac\u009d mentality: MGS has my back. Their ONline website endorses a wealth of open source Common Tools<\/a>. Its cornucopia of recommended no-cost programs range from Mozilla\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sweet tabbed web browser, Firefox<\/a>, to the shiny new collaboration tool, Plone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Personally, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d crown Google as the reigning monarch of freeware. With a host of top-notch free programs including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and the marvel that is Google Earth<\/a>, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no end to their dominion.<\/p>\n

Google\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s free photo editor, Picasa<\/a>, features astonishingly clear, functional and intuitive design. I recommend its use in any communications branch where staff take digital photos at ministry events and need to crop, brighten and re-size them. Why burden creative services or the webmaster with Photoshop requests when you can do it yourself?<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no such thing as a free lunch; but use a little caution, consult your IT folks and you can dig in and enjoy the freeware buffet. Bon appetit!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best things in life are free, or so Janet Jackson tells us. In the case of communications, Ms. Jackson sings the honest truth. I love freeware (that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfree software\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to most of us), and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just because I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a thrifty Scottish lass with penny-pinching tendencies. For example: your minister wants to put sound […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1574],"tags":[1593,1594,1595,1582,1295,1596,1592,1597,1598],"class_list":["post-2944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opspedia-posts","tag-audacity","tag-firefox","tag-freeware","tag-google","tag-online","tag-open-source","tag-opspedia","tag-picasa","tag-plone"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2944"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2945,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2944\/revisions\/2945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pipesdreams.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}