Last night I gave a presentation at a Tweetup at Goldfish Tea in Royal Oak about five free utilities that one can use on their remote web server to provide all kinds of solutions.

• PHP Timeclock – Setup a timeclock for your employees to clock in and out of work through a web browser.
• Wordpress – Blogging platform used by many.
• osCommerce – Full featured shopping cart.
• Joomla! – Complete content management system for building full-featured interactive web sites.
• vTiger CRM – A comprehensive CRM platform.

To illustrate my point, I setup an XAMPP installation on my laptop, with working copies of each of these utilities and loaded sample data. It took me about an hour to do the initial setup for all of these utlities, and I was able to show everyone some of the features and interfaces for them as well. This is mostly just a reference for those who were there last night, but I would encourage anyone who stumbled across this article to check these out.

If you live near Royal Oak, Michigan, or will be in the area in the near future, come check out our tweetup at Goldfish Tea in Royal Oak on Tuesday nights from 7:30pm to 10:00pm, or follow my updates on Twitter for more goings on in the Royal Oak/Detroit Twitterverse.