Independent, non-commercial guides

Business software doesn't have to arrive with a monthly invoice.

A five-person studio in Olomouc just watched its Microsoft 365 renewal quote pass what it pays for office rent. Down the hall, a two-person logistics startup is still tracking client calls in a shared spreadsheet nobody dares to touch.

Neguta teaches Czech startups and small teams how to run daily operations on LibreOffice, Google Workspace, SuiteCRM, and open project management tools, without pretending the switch is effortless.

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Small team reviewing an open-source software setup on a laptop in a bright coworking space Close-up of hands typing on a laptop showing a LibreOffice document Colleagues gathered around a table discussing a project board Notebook with a hand-drawn workflow diagram next to a coffee cup

What we teach, in practice

Somewhere this week, an office manager will open a fresh SuiteCRM install and stare at forty configuration options with no idea which five actually matter for a team of five people. Someone else will spend an afternoon converting two hundred old .doc contracts and lose every custom header along the way.

These are the three problem areas the platform is built around, laid out below the way we'd actually explain them over coffee.

Course

Leaving Microsoft Office without losing your templates

The course walks through Writer versus Word, Calc formulas that behave differently than Excel expects, and Impress versus PowerPoint, plus a parallel path through Google Workspace for teams that want browser-based collaboration instead of a desktop suite. We spend real time on the file-format traps: mail merges that break, macros that don't survive the jump, and the .docx versus .odt compatibility questions that show up the moment a client opens your file somewhere else.

  • Writer vs Word formatting habits
  • Calc formulas and pivot tables
  • Mail merge without a mail server
  • Google Docs live co-editing
  • Choosing .odt, .docx, or both
Two colleagues comparing a document layout between LibreOffice and a printed template
Workshop

Setting up SuiteCRM for a five-person sales team

Installation options for shared hosting, a small VPS, or a Docker container. Importing an existing contact spreadsheet without duplicating half of it. Building a pipeline with stages that match how your team actually talks about a deal, not a generic template. Setting permission levels so five people stop overwriting each other's call notes, and connecting a shared inbox so leads don't vanish into someone's personal folder.

Small team gathered around a laptop configuring a customer relationship management dashboard
Tutorial

OpenProject, Trello, or Notion: picking the one that fits

A checklist board, a project wiki, and a formal Gantt chart solve different problems. The tutorial covers when a simple Trello board is genuinely enough, when Notion's flexibility pays off, and when a project actually needs OpenProject's structure. Full comparison further down this page.

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No affiliate links

Every link in our guides points to official documentation or the tool itself, never to a commission-earning redirect.

No licenses sold

We don't sell software, support contracts, or implementation work. The content is the whole product.

Version-tracked

Guides state which release of LibreOffice or SuiteCRM they were written against, so you know what might have changed.

CZ specifics noted

Where Czech invoicing rules, VAT fields, or local hosting rules affect a setup, the guide says so explicitly.

Why the switch is harder than a feature comparison

Somebody's invoice template opens perfectly on their own laptop and turns into a jumbled mess the moment a client opens it in a different version of Word. It's a small, familiar disaster, and it's exactly why "just compatible enough" software keeps causing hour-long fixes right before a deadline.

Feature checklists make LibreOffice, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365 look nearly interchangeable. On paper they mostly are. In practice, the friction shows up in the details nobody writes down: a spreadsheet macro that references a function name that doesn't exist in Calc, a mail-merge template built around a field that Word calls one thing and LibreOffice calls another, a client who only ever opens attachments in Word for iPad and cannot see your carefully formatted table.

None of that means the switch isn't worth making. For a five-person company paying five separate Microsoft 365 seats every month, the arithmetic is straightforward. What's less straightforward is knowing, before you commit a whole team's afternoon to it, which parts of your existing workflow will transfer cleanly and which ones need a small rebuild.

"A tool that costs nothing to license can still cost you an afternoon if nobody explains the three settings that actually matter." from the LibreOffice migration notes

That's the gap this course tries to close. Not a sales pitch for open-source software, and not a list of features copied from a changelog, but a walkthrough of the specific moments where teams get stuck, and what to do about each one before it eats a Friday afternoon.

The same honesty applies to Google Workspace as an alternative path. It solves the collaboration problem differently than LibreOffice does: instead of a desktop app with local files, you get browser-based documents that several people can edit at once, with version history built in. For a distributed or hybrid team, that can matter more than any formatting fidelity question.

The trade-off is dependence on an internet connection and on Google's own infrastructure, which raises different questions around data location and account control than a locally installed suite does. The course covers both paths side by side rather than picking a winner, because the right answer depends on how your team actually works, not on which tool has a longer feature list.

We also spend time on the unglamorous parts: setting default file formats so a whole team doesn't quietly diverge into using six different ones, agreeing on a shared template library, and building a five-minute habit of exporting anything that needs to leave the building as a PDF instead of hoping the recipient has the right software installed.

Founder and colleague reviewing a sales pipeline on a shared screen during a CRM setup workshop

A CRM that a five-person team can actually maintain

A founder is chasing three leads across two inboxes and a sticky note by the coffee machine. Nobody remembers who called whom last, and a promising client goes quiet because a follow-up email never got sent. This is the exact moment the SuiteCRM workshop is built to address, before the team grows large enough that the mess becomes expensive.

The workshop moves through the setup in the order a small team would actually need it: getting the software running somewhere reliable, bringing in contacts that already exist somewhere else, shaping a pipeline with stages that match real conversations rather than a generic template, and deciding who can see, edit, or delete what. We also cover the two mistakes that come up most often with small self-hosted CRM installs: skipping backups because "we'll set that up later," and over-customizing modules in the first week before anyone has used the system long enough to know what actually needs changing.

None of this requires a dedicated IT hire. It requires an afternoon, a checklist, and a willingness to leave some fields blank until they're actually needed.

OpenProject, Trello, and Notion, side by side

Picture two teams that both decided to "get organized" this quarter. One ended up with a Notion workspace nobody updates anymore because logging a single task takes ten clicks through nested pages. The other has an OpenProject Gantt chart that's technically accurate but took a week to configure for a project that only lasts six weeks. Both teams picked a reasonable tool. Neither picked the right one for the job at hand.

Trello

Makes sense when: a small team needs a visual board for a handful of ongoing workflows, with a free tier that covers most day-to-day needs without a credit card.

Where it struggles: multi-phase projects with dependencies between tasks, or reporting that goes beyond "what column is this card in."

Notion

Makes sense when: a team wants documentation, a wiki, and light task tracking living in the same place, with a flexible structure that adapts as needs change.

Where it struggles: heavy databases and linked views can slow down, and it isn't built for Gantt charts or formal task dependencies.

OpenProject

Makes sense when: a project needs a formal plan, a Gantt chart, budget tracking, or coordination across several teams, and can be self-hosted for full control over the data.

Where it struggles: the setup and learning curve are heavier than a two-person team with a short checklist usually needs.

The tutorial goes further into hosting requirements for OpenProject, the practical limits of Trello's free plan, and how to structure a Notion workspace so it doesn't collapse under its own flexibility six months in.

What this platform is, and isn't

A visitor once emailed asking which reseller we partner with for SuiteCRM support contracts. The honest answer is none. We don't have one, and we're not planning to add one.

Neguta is an educational resource. The guides exist to explain how these tools work and when each one fits a small Czech team's budget and workflow, not to funnel anyone toward a purchase. Nothing on this site links to a paid license, a hosting affiliate program, or an implementation contractor.

No affiliate links

Not one link on this site carries a referral code or tracking parameter.

No paid placements

Tool comparisons are written the same way whether the software is popular or obscure.

No implementation upsell

We teach the setup ourselves; we don't offer to do it for a fee afterward.

Independent testing

Every step in a guide is tested on a real or virtual install before it gets published.

Questions before you start a course

Call

+420 840 103 000

Email

[email protected]

Location

Tererovo nám. 897/5
Olomouc, Czech Republic

Start wherever the pain point is

Maybe it's the Office renewal invoice still unopened in your inbox. Maybe it's the CRM spreadsheet with three people's contact edits color-coded in a losing battle. Either way, the next step is a short message, not a sales call.

Get in touch