eFront is an open source e-learning platform also known as a Course Management System (CMS), or Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is suitable for both company and educational usage. IT is Free to use under GPL.

eFront is offered as open source software. Download it, customize it to your needs, add new functionalities

eFront includes a wide variety of components that help you create your lesson structure and add content, build online-tests, communicate with others, track users history and progress, conduct surveys, assign projects, and create certifications. And this list just scratches the surface of the system.

Efront provide very useful modules like

· Conference (This module offers a bridge between eFront and the video conferencing (real time communication) tool DimDim.)

· Links (you can create an unlimited number of links that will be visible from the main lessons page together with their description.)

· FAQ (Build “frequently asked questions” lists for your lessons. Use it to answer basic and common questions that arise frequently among the students.)

· YouTube (Build and share lists of youtube videos with your students. Youtube videos are directly embedded to the lesson’s dashboard.)

· Billboard (Integrate to your lesson’s dashboard a visually appealing introduction that can include images, sounds or videos.)

· Translate (This modules uses the Google’s translation API to integrate translations between any language pairs into your lessons)

About Encryption Software: TrueCrypt

There are many types of data encryption, and they are the basis of network security. You can encrypt the data by any Encryption Software.

Main task of Encryption software is Encryption and Decryption of data, usually in the form of files on (or sectors of) hard drives and removable media, email messages, or in the form of packets sent over computer networks.

TrueCrypt is a very Latest Software for Data Encryption. It’s free open-source disk encryption software for Windows Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume.

Features & Functionality:

• This Software creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and builds up it as a real disk.
• Encrypts an entire partition or storage device for example USB flash drive or hard drive.
• TrueCrypt can on-the-fly encrypt a system partition or entire system drive
• System encryption involves pre-boot authentication, which means to access the system, need to enter the correct password each time before Windows boots.
• Data is automatically encrypted or decrypted right before it is loaded or saved, without any user intercession.
• If in case an adversary forces you to reveal the password, It provides two levels of plausible deniability.

1) Hidden Volume - There are many situations where you cannot refuse to reveal the password (for example, due to extortion). Hidden volume allows you to solve such situations without revealing the password to your volume. You may Read data stored on the (outer) volume without any risk.

2) No TrueCrypt volume can be identified (volumes cannot be distinguished from random data).

TrueCrypt never saves any decrypted data to a disk – it only stores them temporarily in RAM. When you restart Windows or turn off your computer, the volume will be dismounted and files stored in it will be unreachable and encrypted. Same thing Happens even when Power supply is suddenly interrupted. To make them accessible again, you have to mount the volume - provide the correct password and/or keyfile.

phpShop is a PHP-powered shopping cart application. It is released under the GNU General Public License. phpShop has less features that many other shopping cart applications, but is generally easier to customize. All that is required to effectively customize phpShop is a basic knowledge of HTML, PHP, and SQL.

phpShop is written in PHP and therefore requires the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. phpShop also requires a database; phpShop currently supports MySQL for this purpose.

The original developers of phpShop needed to build a shopping cart web site. Other solutions were fairly complete but much too complicated to learn since they used their own tag language or were based on early CGI scripting languages.

phpShop Features

• * Shopping cart per visiting shopper
• * Minicart visible for shoppers as they browse site
• * Simple search tool for finding products
• * Category based navigation of store
• * Show current specials
• * Sales statistics
• * Order management and processing
• * Manage multiple order status types
• * Update order statuses
• * WYSIWYG editing of product descriptions
• * Unlimited number of products
• * Unlimited number of product categories
• * Able to display multiple prices per product
• * Pricing based on shopper groups
• * SKU based product listings with SKU’s at the product attribute(s) level
• * Database driven for dynamic store maintenance
• * Administrative user management
• * SSL template driven admin and storefront pages
• * Upload category, product, and store images via web browser
• * Multiple shipping addresses per shopper
• * Separate shipping and handling charge calculation
• * Customizable zone based tax calculation (city/state & country/region)
• * Ability to create shopper groups
• * Order management with customizable order status types
• * Email notifications of orders
• * Live credit card processing through payment processors
• * Shoppers can view orders with status
• * Ability to set tax rates for multiple countries, states and cities.
• * Shoppers registration
• * Shoppers have secure account access to view current and previous orders
• * Shipping address book for storing multiple shipping or billing addresses
• * Zone based shipping methods

WHMCS is the complete all-in-one client management, billing & support solution for Web Hosts &Other Online Businesses.It also automates many routine tasks including invoicing, order provisioning, suspensions, and more.

WHMCS is a powerful integrated client management, billing & support system. It provides everything you need to manage your clients.

* Automated Recurring Billing & Simple One Time Invoicing
* Flexible Product Options, Custom Welcome Emails, Fields & Options
* Automated Hosting/Domain Provisioning & Management
* Payment Tracking, Accounting Features & Statistical Reports
* Easy to Use Client Area with Integrated Support Tools
* Fully Customisable Client Area with a Powerful Templating System
* Development Kits, Action Hooks & an API for integrating & extending

Features :-

* Supports products of any type - not just hosting!
* Prorata Billing Support (One Day Billing)
* Configurable Options for products which increase/decrease the price
* Custom Field support allowing you to collect specific data from a customer
* Addons which allow you to cross-sell additional products & services to clients
* Downloadable Product Support - eg. Software Downloads
* Stock Management/Auto suspension of orders once unavailable
* Automatic invoice generation x days before items are due, reminders and overdue notices all automated
* Ability to create one-off invoices - ideal for web design/consultancy firms
* Automated Recurring Credit Card Billing
* ntegration with over 10 of the leading domain registrars
* Automated Domain Registrations & Transfers
* Automated Expiry Notices
* Clients can renew anytime from the client area
* Ability to make Nameserver Changes
* Make changes to the WHOIS Contact Information

Ning is the only online service where you can create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.Ning is an online platform for users to create their own social websites and social networks

Ning hopes to compete with large social sites like MySpace and Facebook, by appealing to users who want to create networks around specific interests or have limited technical skills.The unique feature of Ning is that anyone can create their own custom social network for a particular topic or need, catering to specific audiences.

Ning narrowed its focus to offering a group website, a photos website, and a videos website for people to copy and use for any purpose.

Currently, Ning has two primary business models. One allows users to create a network for free, in exchange for the network hosting ads that Ning supplies. The other, their “Ning for Business” option, offers users a network where they control the ad content (or lack thereof), in exchange for a monthly fee. A few other premium services such as extra storage and bandwidth and non-Ning URLs are also available for additional monthly fees.

Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control.

Magento was designed with the notion that each eCommerce implementation has to be unique since no two businesses are alike. Magento’s modular architecture puts the control back in the hands of the online merchant and places no constraints on business processes and flow.

Magento is available on GPL (General Public Licence)

New In Magento

* Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories. For example: Percent Discount | Fixed Amount Discount | Free Shipping | Buy x, get y free. | Buy x, get y with percent or fixed amount discount | Buy x, get free shipping on order | Buy x, get percent discount | Buy x, get fixed amount discount.

* Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products

* Free Shipping Option

* Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts

* Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing

* Landing Page Tool for Campaigns

* Search Engine Friendly URL’s

* URL Rewrites

* Recently Viewed Products

* Recently Compared Items

* New Items Promotional Tool

* Up-sells in Shopping Cart

* Cross-sells on product pages

* Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only

* Send Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS

* RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags

* Auto-generated Site Map

* Google Site Map

* Polls

* Newsletter Management

Site Management :

* Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed

* Multi-Lingual

* Support for localization

* Support for multiple currencies

* Administration Permission System Roles and Users

* Flexible tax rate management with support for US and International markets

* Fully 100% customizable design using templates

* Customer Groups

* One-Click Upgrades

* Content Management System for Informational Pages

For More Info:

• http://perceptsys.blog.co.in/about/
• http://wwwperceptionsystemcom-perception.blogspot.com/

Pligg is a Web 2.0 Open Source Content Management System based on PHP/MySQL.

“Pligg is unique compared to most other content management systems because of its flexibility. A web designer can do pretty much anything with Pligg because the software was designed to be used in as many ways as possible. Not only can a person with very little knowledge of PHP and MySQL install it, but they can modify and administer it with relatively little difficulty. For those who have a greater understanding of web languages, Pligg can act as the first step in a highly customized personal content management system.”

Features
Pligg is become one of oustanding cms around the world because of their digg a like news system, where people control the news and people vote for news they like. Its like a web 2.0

Plugins/Hacks
Plugins, pligg plugins is still not much, at their website only a few have been listed and its maybe not worth for make 1 directory plugins for pligg

A development system for Flash-based applications from Adobe. Introduced in 2004 as a J2EE application, Flex compiles Action Script code and XML-based user interface descriptions (MXML) into binary Flash files (SWF files). It also includes a variety of user interface functions for creating rich client applications.

Overview:

Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. While Flex applications can be built using only the free Flex SDK, developers can use Adobe® Flex® Builder™ 3 software to dramatically accelerate development

It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript™ 3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic. Flex also includes a rich component library with more than 100 proven, extensible UI components for creating rich Internet applications (RIAs), as well as an interactive Flex application debugger.

RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Adobe Flash® Player software or on the desktop on Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system runtime.

Flash and Flex applications are rendered in the browser using Flash Player and on the desktop using the Adobe AIR runtime.

WPMU is short for WordPress MultiUser or, WordPress_MU.

WordPress MU, or WordPressµ, is the multi-user version of the famous WordPress blogging application. It is ideal for people who want to set up a large network of blogs. WordPress MU is also used by newspapers, magazines, blog networks, universities and large companies running corporate blogging systems behind firewalls.

Using the WordPress multi-user edition, you will be able offer your users an opportunity to sign up for a new blog. They will be able to securely manage their templates and settings without affecting any other users. You can have unlimited users with unlimited blogs, and users can have various roles (author, etc) on each others blogs.

Features:

WordPress MU is a unique WordPress product. Plugins and themes are controlled by a central system administrator. So unlike the single-user version of WordPress, individual MU bloggers cannot upload their own plugins and themes, only select from the ones made available by the system administrator.

Benefits

• Ability to create a hosted “community” of users.
• Ability to host thousands of users on one site.
• Opportunity to provide free hosting as an incentive to paid hosting services.
• Various options for adding plugins and administration features.
• Customization of the administration panels.
• Ability to add WordPress Themes, increasing user choices.
• Ability to control WordPress Themes, limiting user choices per site needs.
• Security precautions and protections in place.
• Easy addition of comment spam protection through plugins.

WordPress MU is designed for hosts to offer hosting of WordPress blogs to individual users. The full version of WordPress is still free and available for download, and it is designed to offer full customization for the single or multi-user blogs and/or multiple blogs by a single administrator.

Wordpress is written in PHP and licensed under the GNU General Public License, which allows for its use in most applications.

“Open source is a set of principles and practices on how to write software, the most important of which is that the source code is openly available”

The free software movement was launched in 1983. In 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software be replaced by open source software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world. Software developers may want to publish their software with an open source license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand how it works.

Benefits of Open Source Software

Low Cost
No need to buy expensive server software licenses or renew. The service includes all required software, and never required any additional softwares.

Efficient Working
The major reason is it is virus free. Also it works fine with lower configuration hardware. You will not require to take higher configuration hardware.

Reliability
Almost all software releases contain bugs. When a bug is spotted in proprietary software, the only people who can fix it are the original developers, as only they have access to the source code. Open source software is different. As a large number of users can access and change the code, bugs tend to be more visible and more rapidly corrected. One of the slogans of the open source movement is that ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’

Customization
Closed source applications can only be customized or adapted by the original vendor. Open source applications may be customized by anyone with the requisite skill. Thus, open source software can be readily adapted to meet specific user needs. Even if you cannot program yourself, it is easy to post a feature request on an open source software project’s home page. If you would like something added or customized urgently, you can generally pay an appropriately skilled software developer to do it for you.

Translation
With access to the source code it is easy to translate the language of the software interface. Large closed source commercial software vendors are usually unwilling to translate their products into less widely spoken languages, as the market for them would be too small to guarantee profit.

Easy Learning From Examples
If you are interested in programming, open source code provides an excellent resource from which to learn, and open source projects provide a practical environment in which to test your skills. Just watching the development process can provide an education in itself. If you choose to submit code to an open source project, it will generally be checked and commented on by experienced programmers. Once you have convinced the project community that your code is of appropriate quality, you may be granted full committer rights yourself.

Large Community and become a part of it
By adopting open source software you become part of a community of users and developers who have an interest in working together to support each other and improve the software. The extent to which you engage with this community is up to you, but you may obtain the intangible benefits of goodwill if you do.

There is leading software and development providers who offer a range of powerful Open Source Software that provide zero risk, cost effective functionality. Rather than the expensive and risky approach of building a bespoke site from scratch First Rate uses a proven base system and simply plugs in proven modules as required.

Popular Open source Software:

• Oscommerce – Ecommerce Application
• Zen Cart — Ecommerce Application
• Joomla — Content Management System
• TYPO3 — Enterprise Level Content Management System
• X-Cart — Ecommerce Application
• Cs-Cart — Ecommerce Application
• Wordpress — Blog System
• phpBB — Discussion Forum
• Drupal — Content Management System
• Moodle — Learning Management System
• phpNuke — Content Management Portal
• mambo — Content Management Portal

For more:

• http://perceptsys.blog.co.in/
• http://wwwperceptionsystemcom-perception.blogspot.com/