What are advantages and disadvantages of a Proprietary System and an Open Platform?

Choosing the right type of software is necessary for running a business as efficiently as possible in the global marketplace. Generally, you have one of two choices choosing a software platform for business purposes or even creating a website. One choice is proprietary software trademarked and likely requiring you to obtain or purchase a license while one choice is open-source software which is free software that you can download and pay no licensing fees to use. Using them has advantages and disadvantages. 

Advantages

With a proprietary-software system, you will be able to utilize the software company's customer service department for troubleshooting and setup purposes. Proprietary software may have more features that appeal to the business owner and is generally adjusted to meet a market need. 

Often, open-source software is cheaper or free. Additionally, it is widely distributed. Therefore, if you have any question, you can ask and gain help from a large number of users on the Internet via forums or other information sources. Often fast bug and security fixes are available for open-source software when problems arise

Expense

One of the big drawbacks of a proprietary-software package is expense. Proprietary-software users will generally charge a licensing fee to the software company that needs to take advantage of its product because the software company needs to sell its product to survive. This licensing fee can be fairly expensive, especially compared to open-source software. If open-source software requires any fees, they are usually required for the software itself not necessarily for ongoing licensing maintenance.

Developer

Compared to open-source software, proprietary software makes business owners too heavily dependent on the developer. It is another drawback of proprietary software. Only own programmers and developers understand the code that makes the software work. Generally, the licensee will not be able to turn to other business owners and users for help with the product.

Adaptability

Generally, proprietary software products make it difficult to adapt to changes in the marketplace. However, open-source software tends to be much quicker to adapt to these types of changes and often provides the business owner with more flexibility. Sometimes proprietary developers slowly offer fixes for any bugs that their software may have.

Source: smallbusiness

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A powerful suite of open platform products of inFORM Decisions

I am sure that if you are running a company, you only want your business process to be improved as much as possible and your business environment to be more efficient. 

In fact, when you want to use products to help your business gain productivity and efficiency, you have two choices: a proprietary system and an open platform. It is believed that an open platform is better when it provides a lot of benefits. I agree with that. However, I am sure that you may be confused when there are a lot of open platform products out there. You really do not know what best open platform products are. But now your problem is solved when inFORM Decisions introduces a suite of open platform products including iCapture, iView and iSign. They will help your business a lot. 

Let’s discover these open platform products. 

iCapture : Feature-rich, affordable document capture and scanning solution

iCapture is a good capture platform for those who want to automatically scan and image. It can meet all the needs of an organization such as document scanning and import, data capture, OCR/ICR, forms processing, data extraction and the ability to migrate the information into a backend. You can use this solution whether your company is small or large. In fact, it is an affordable, scalable solution.

iView: Web-based Content/Document Management Solution 

In fact, iView is an affordable document archive – retrieval solution with powerful integration capabilities. With iView, you can archive your documents and make them available for search and retrieval via a web interface by anytime, anywhere and anyone. You can save costs related to storing, retrieving and sharing documents. 

iSign: Mobile Signature Capture

iSign, a mobile electronic signature capture solution allows you to capture signatures from a browse java enabled mobile device, apply them to business documents ranging from invoices, forms, to reports and upload iView. Signatures provided by iSign are 100% legal. 

As you see, these open platform products provide a lot of benefits. Especially, they are easy to use interfaces and powerful integration capabilities.

Source: inFORM Decisions

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