This is high quality advice, which is refreshing to see in today's blog economy.

I learned a few things, and the fact that I'm already leveraging some of these tools made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside =]

I have to disagree with some of the thinking here. In my view, TIME is your most valuable resource, and anything that isn't a core competency you want to get out with as little investment of time as possible.

TWO DAYS of hacking spent (squandered?) building your own phone system? Really? Unless you have significant staff, how can that be remotely a reasonable return vs just using cell phones?

Many of the other suggestions are good ones, but don't get caught in the trap of "Just because I can do XXX which will save $Y, that I obviously should." If your core competency has something to do with phones, by all means hack away on your phone system.

Hi,

I am the author of the article.

I agree that time is valuable, but if you charge yourself out at, say, £600 a day, and you save 4 grand building a phone switch in 2 days, it's an easy decision to make. It wasn't time squandered. I save money every time I need to make a change to the phone list, as I dont have to call out an engineer.

If you are a 2 person company, then there's obviously no point. We built our phone switch when we moved into our own offices and hired employee number 5, which I think was about the right time to do it.

Don't sell asterisk short, it's a tremendous tool for businesses of all sizes. Even if you only use mobile extensions it's trivial to write an extensions.conf script to play "Press 1 for sales, 2 for support" and have it ring different queues depending on keypress. If your company has any telephone needs at all this should be on your short list. IVRs, Conference rooms, automated phone status updates, queues, voicemail via email, and on and on. If you have two offices that would communicate by long distance (even/especially international), you can set up an IAX trunk and connect the sites for free.

The company I work for scaled from two people on the queues to 15+ desks+cells and counting -- 50 employees to 1500+ with only the most minor tweaking. For a while we also had IAX trunk links to major vendors and other companies that we spent a lot of phone time with.

I can't recommend it enough.

At last, an article on saving that seems to be actually useful.

Useful, but they didn't include Google Apps. No need to deal with an SMTP server, and it's $50/year or free with ads. It's a lot easier to sync calendars and documents across a team if everyone is using Google Apps.

I think you're mainly referring to using Google for Mail (as opposed to running and SMTP server). Actually that's what I'm going to refer to - its the one argument I have, using Google for mail gives you POP/IMAP and a great web interface, as well as robust architecture, all built in for cheap/free -definitely worth it. (Note you can just point your mail to google via DNS and still control your domain).

They did include google apps. Look at "He’s no longer the Richest Man in the World" again.

Some businesses like keeping their data internal. There's nothing wrong with running your own SMTP server. Personally, I'm not exactly thrilled with Google's choice to make email into "conversations." Plus, how much control do you have over your data if it's in Google's hands?

Ever heard of Hula?

Time is more valuable than anything.

Google Apps = better than any other email solution and free.

Also, please, if your smallbiz cannot aford a Campfire account, come one, what kind of business are you doing? IRC is not for everybody.

" IRC is not for everybody."

What are the down sides to using IRC?

Great article, I just bookmarked it, I think every startuper should do the same. I spend a great deal of my time on how to implement cost effective solutions, this is a great complement to my goal of running a startup that build great products for less.

I have witnessed firsthand how money shortage can ruin startup with great ideas; it’s not pretty.

Wow! That article was fantastic! My best bud worked for Asterisk for a while, so I knew how to get cheap VoIP. Just order that switching line from the telco.

I didn't even know there was an OSS alternative to VMware/MS Server! Again, great stuff!

I bookmarked this page and I'm forwarding it to my partners as I write this.

Good article with quite a list of 'free things'. Surprised it missed putting Skype on your mobile (cell phone) - especially useful for international collaborations.

if irc isn't your thing, just install a jabber daemon on that unix server that is now doing your mail/spam filtering/cacti/etc. add the conferencing component to it and you'll have real-time group chat just like irc that works in adium/ichat.