Home Page (General Welcome, New Visitors)

Try-out Open Source software for free! We make it as easy as 1-2-3. You search; you select; you try. No long downloads. No installation hassles. There aren't even any risks! We deliver pre-configured, fully functional software appliances right to your desktop as virtual machines that you can run right in your web browser. All you have to do is — click2try.

Home Page (Visitors — Business Professionals section)

Business pros, you may relax now! We've taken all the risks out of trying Open Source software that will let you be more productive and cost-effective at the same time. How? By constructing virtual machines containing useful software appliance packages that we deliver right to your desktop. You can try them out for free, and subscribe to the ones you really like. We have several SaaS subscription plans available.

Home Page (Visitors — Open Source Developers section)

Open Source developers, rejoice! A vast, untapped market of new users of your software is about to open up to you! We're making it much easier for users all over the world to try-out your software, and, ultimately, to become persistent users. And you won't have to do a thing —except perhaps to join our community web site and participate in everything that we have to offer you and your expanded user base.

Home Page > Landing Page: IT Professionals

Finally, IT professionals have an elegant solution for researching, evaluating, and implementing Open Source software!

The rules of the game for selecting the right software and delivering it in the hands of the user are changing! Savvy customers no longer want to pay for the high costs of commercial software, with its associated continual maintenance releases, its disruptive major upgrades procedures, its recurring support contracts, and its complex, software licensing schemes. The time and energy expended in such activities place such an enormous strain on IT departments —which provide the essential technological infrastructure for the whole company— that it is unsustainable. Thanks to click2try, however, there is a new way to select, evaluate, and implement software. And it's a much more cost-effective, time-saving, risk-free way than the current model which directs the way most IT departments operate.

Streamline the software selection process.

click2try streamlines the software selection process that you would normally have to go through by doing all the grunt work for you. We do all of the time-consuming research, evaluation, configuration, and installation for you. We scour the Open Source software world for the best software available in a wide range of business application categories. Then, we gather together the often disparate elements required to make the application work properly, and we configure them all into a fully functional, stand-alone software appliance that we deliver to your desktop in a browser window as a secure virtual machine.

No configuration problems.

We take all the risk and all the worry out of your usual configuration problems, because you won't have any software to configure. We keep it all on our host servers. Nothing gets downloaded to you; nothing gets installed on your computers. Using virtualization technologies, we will start-up the virtual machines of your choice anytime you like when you merely hit the click2try button in our Appliance catalog, and, within about thirty seconds, you will be able to run the software appliance you selected inside your browser.

No provisioning or deployment issues.

Since we never actually download any files to your computers, you don't have to spend any time provisioning our software appliances on your company's computers. If you have an Internet browser installed, you have all the software you need to run our virtual machines. When you're done running the virtual machine, you close it down until the next time you want access. It's as simple as that!

No additional hardware required.

Not only don't you have to worry about the ramifications of installing new software on your computers, but you also do not have to be concerned about spending money —or time!— purchasing any additional hardware. We maintain all of our software appliances on our host servers in a secure, hardened location in Houston, Texas.

Open source software appliances reside on our host servers.

Whenever you start-up one of our virtual machines, your request triggers a command to one of our host servers for immediate delivery of your chosen software appliance directly to your desktop. As we try to portray in our logo, what you are seeing on your remote desktop is a mirror of what we are running on our host server, all made possible through the magic of our unique virtual machine technology.

The rules of the software delivery game are changing: Join the evolution.

The rules for selecting, evaluating, installing, configuring, delivering, and operating software are all changing. If you want to keep on top of your game, we suggest that you change with them. Become a part of a new and exciting evolution, as we use virtual machines to deliver Open Source software throughout the world. Join our website, and participate fully in everything that our Open Source software community has to offer. Register today.

Home Page (New Visitors' Registration section)

Join our Open Source community web site, and take full advantage of all the features we offer. Registration is free. All you need is an email address.

What We Do

Software Selection Made Easy

We streamline the selection process that you typically have to go through to determine the right software to do the job.

As any non-technical, department manager knows, the journey from identifying a particular business need to implementing the right software to address that need can be tedious and time-consuming. It can also be quite frustrating. 

You usually have to follow a rigid set of laborious, procedural baby steps. First, you have to research the market for software in the category you desire. Then, you have to narrow the choices down to a viable few. Additionally, you have to persuade a perpetually over-burdened IT department to allocate its scarce resources to installing and testing out the top choices —when, that is, they can take time off from fighting fires and reacting to more urgent, corporate needs. Finally, you have to run demos with your actual data to assess the software's functionality and determine if it really does meet your business need. Only then can you decide to purchase that software and implement it.

At click2try, we eliminate much of that time-consuming tedium. We've already pre-selected the best software packages in the Open Source community, and we've bundled them together into fully functional appliances that you can try-out for free in your own web browser. You have exclusive access to our pre-configured virtual machines as often as you like in discrete sessions lasting for [several-To Be Determined] hours each.

Additionally, we will grant you uninterrupted, web browser access to a persistent virtual machine running with your data on our secure, host servers for a nominal subscription fee.

To get started, search our Appliances Catalog, select the software that meets your needs, and click on the click2try button to check it out.

The click2try Experience makes selecting software as easy as 1-2-3.

Creating a Community

Creating a Community

In the world of Open Source software, there are many excellent applications that software developers make freely available to the general public, but which rarely get used.

There are several reasons for this. All too often the technical barriers for installing the software are much too high for non-technical users to hurdle. Or, there may be no instructional guides to tell people how to use the software. Or, there may be no technical support to call upon when help is needed.

Opening up new markets for Open Source software.

At the same time, there are potential customers all over the world eagerly looking for good software to help them run their businesses, manage their projects, and solve their problems in the most efficient, cost-effective way they can find. These non-technical people would really like to try-out Open Source software. However, they have no way to properly evaluate what applications are appropriate for them without altering their own computer's configuration, or without putting themselves through a whole lot of possibly wasted effort in the process.

Making it easy, fast, risk-free to try Open Source software.

At click2try, we intend to remedy all that by creating a brand-new, community-oriented web site where people can come to try-out Open Source software for free with no risk of altering their computer's current configuration. We want to make it easy, fast, and risk-free for you to try-out Open Source software.

Bridging the gap between technical and non-technical users.

At click2try, we want to create a community web site that will "bridge the gap" between the world of Open Source software and the world of the non-technical, business-user:

• By providing free Quick-Start guides and video tutorials, we'll show you how to get started using the software.

• By supplying telephone-based, help desk access, we'll give you free tech support.

• By hosting fully functional, pre-configured software appliances on our servers as secure, virtual machines that you can access remotely over the Internet for free via a web browser.

Eliminating the risks.

We take all the risks out of evaluating the best software that the Open Source world has to offer. See for yourself!
To join our community, all you have to do is — click2try!

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(click2try graphics designed by HexaGroup, Houston, Texas.)

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Free trial over, but you want more?

OK, let's say that you tried-out our virtual machines and you found some Open Source software appliances that you really like! Maybe you discovered how easily WordPress can turn you into a blogger and give you a voice on the web.

Or, maybe you learned how effortlessly dotProject will help you organize yourself so that you can deliver projects on time and under budget.

Or, maybe you checked out Joomla —a powerful content management system—and you got a taste for how it can give you control over the content of a vast, sprawling web site without your having to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars you would otherwise have to pay for a commercially developed, enterprise scale version. (Hey, we're no fools: we use Joomla ourselves to run click2try!)

What's Next?

You like the software. Your boss likes the software. Your whole department likes the software! Everyone wants to start using the software on a regular basis. So, what's next? What can you do next to keep using the software in the same, no-risk manner after your free trial period expires?

It's time to get SaaSy!

We have a solution for you! It's called SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service. An innovative, dramatically growing trend in the deployment of software, SaaS allows customers to securely, efficiently, and cost-effectively run applications that are hosted on remote servers.

Besides offering businesses a low-cost method of getting the benefits of using software without paying a high initial purchase price or suffering from the associated technical complexities and inherent risks of in-house installations, the SaaS model of accessing software over the Internet also reduces the end users' investment in server hardware and other internal, overhead expenses.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Subscription Plans Available.

What makes click2try unique in the marketplace is that we're combining the SaaS model of software deployment with advanced virtualization technologies to deliver Open Source software to you in the form of virtual machines that you can try-out for free on your desktop.

We think that's a pretty cool thing to do, but that's only half of what we're offering. In addition to letting you try-out our Open Source software appliances for free on a temporary basis, we also let you subscribe to as many virtual machines as you wish on a permanent basis.

We have a variety of subscription plans available to suit your needs —ranging from individual subscriptions for one virtual machine, to company-wide packages that can be customized to suit the bandwidth needs and storage requirements of several users accessing multiple virtual machines concurrently.

For details and rates, visit our Software as a Service (SaaS) Subscription page.

How to Participate

How to Participate at click2try.com

click2try is not only a web site where you can try-out Open Source software for free, but it is also a community of people helping each other to get the most out of the software they use. You can participate in our community in several ways.

• Review software that you've tried out to give others a sense of what's good (or not so good!) about it, how you used it, and what value you got from it.

• Join forums and share your opinions, your tips, and your insights into the world of Open Source software and other, related topics.

• Author articles on interesting subjects.

• Suggest links to informative, educational, or newsworthy items that you'd like to see included in our resources section and in our archives.

• Collaborate in the design and assembling of software appliances that will solve business problems or meet the needs of professional members of our community.

• Build a software appliance yourself and submit it to us for consideration as a virtual machine that we can offer to the community through our catalog of virtual machine appliances.

• Create audio- and video-based tutorials to show other members how to use the software in a productive manner.

• Tell others about us, through your blogs and your emails, to help our community grow stronger, so that we can provide more software appliances, more resources, and more expertise for everyone to draw upon.

Software Appliances Catalog

The Appliances Catalog section of the click2try web site is still being developed. When completed, this section will feature:

• Appliance Submission Guidelines— information on the procedures to follow for anyone who wants to collaborate with us in creating future virtual machines, or who wants to submit software appliance packages of their own for distribution via our web site.

Community

The Community section of the click2try web site is still being developed. When completed, this section will feature:

• Forums— free-flowing, tech support discussions and marketing information pertaining primarily to our virtual machines and the world of Open Source Software.

• Job Board— listings and links to employment and consulting opportunities in the world of Open Source software, programming, and related fields. Members will be able to create profiles and post resumes.

Coming Soon

• Profile— customized account information pertaining to the logged-in user, with personal information kept confidential, in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

• RSS Feeds— gives registered members the opportunity to subscribe to Really Simple Syndication (RSS) data feeds, like news releases, audio podcasts, and video podcasts on subjects that interest them.

Coming Soon

• Virtual FAQs— to provide on-line technical support and information regarding what we do here and how we do it.

• How to Participate instructions— to learn how to become an active member of our click2try community, how to review software, how to submit a virtual appliance, how to suggest the creation of a new virtual appliance, how to post a resume, how to search for jobs, how to participate in blogs, how to join or moderate forums, etc.

• Software Reviews— an archive of comments, ratings, and rankings on the Open Source software virtual machine appliances which we make available here on our web site, as contributed by registered members of the click2try community. Reviews will be made available in text, audio, and video formats, according to a reviewer's preference.

• Video Resources— QuickTime movies containing: video tutorials on how to use the virtual machine software appliances; video-based software reviews; video testimonials of Open Source software products by participating click2try community members; video welcoming messages in member profiles; video animations illustrating specific functions or applications; video documentaries on Open Source software development and developers; and other archival footage.

• QuickStart Guides

The QuickStart guides of the click2try web site are still being developed. When completed this section will feature:

• An instructional, scenario-based user manual, tutorial-style for each software appliance.
• An instructional, scenario-based video, tutorial-style for each software appliance.

As planned, these QuickStart guides will be written in a style that will rely on a delicate blend between marketing flair and technical savvy. The QuickStart guides will be essentially structured into three parts:

1) an introductory section that is written in the style of an ad that encourages, excites, and motivates a user to want to try-out —and eventually subscribe to— that product. This introductory ad copy will explain what the virtual appliance is designed to do, while telling the customer what the benefits are of using that particular software. This introductory ad copy will not only educate the customer about the features and benefits of the virtual appliance from a marketing standpoint, but it must also be primarily designed to motivate the customer to try it out. The introductory ad copy will take on the role of the packaging copy on a software CD that a customer picks up in a brick-and-mortar store.

2) a set of scenario-based tutorial exercises which will teach the user, in an easy-to-follow, spoon-fed, numbered-step-by-numbered-step fashion (with explanatory annotation in between the steps) how to perform a set of tasks that, when altogether completed, result in a project having been accomplished. Although the QuickStart guides will present the essential technical information in the tutorials to allow a user to get up and running in the virtual machine, they will do so with a marketing orientation and style. The tutorials will include a multitude of screen captures and other illustrations, even links to videos, if possible, in order to provide concrete, visual information to the new learner.

The step-by-step exercises in the scenario-based, tutorials will require users to complete discrete tasks that will contribute to, and be part of, a larger project, like a fictional manned space flight. We believe that, by creating tutorials which are thematically linked to a larger, all-encompasing narrative story-line, we will not only be able to provide a unifying context within which our writers can create the sample procedures which they will teach, but that we will also be adding an entertainment factor to the learning process. We want to make the learning process easy, fast, and fun.

3) Even though we hate boring, dull, mundane technical documentation (and we intend to put as much distance between us and that kind of writing as possible!), we plan to append a glossary, or a listing, of menu commands, for reference.

By intention, the QuickStart guides will not be designed to be comprehensive. The overall goals of the QuickStart guides will be to create a positive feeling in the user by providing sufficient technical information in the step-by-step examples to develop a sense of confidence in the product, while also teasing, encouraging, and motivating the user to want to learn more about the software appliance by subscribing to our service for an extended period of time.