Picking a favorite product from an impressive crowd of competitive offerings is never an easy task, and such was the case with our Editors' Best and Community Choice awards this year. The former award program highlights products that Windows IT Pro editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition, whereas the latter program turned that process over to you, our readers.
Our Community Choice awards allowed readers to decide which products and services were chosen for acclaim and recognition. Rather than presenting a predefined list of products and services that limited your selection to choices our editorial team had already made, this year we decided to open up the process to everyone and let you determine the products and services that were worthy of inclusion in our final voting phase. We also encouraged IT pros to submit comments about why they selected the products they did, so you'll see lots of insightful comments and real-world wisdom from IT pros about their favorite products on the pages that follow.
Unlike last year—when we treated both award programs as separate entities—we decided to merge both of these award programs together this year. We've listed the top three Editors' Best products in each category directly adjacent to our Community Choice winners. Sometimes our editors and readers agree on what products and services were best in a given category, and sometimes they didn't. Yet regardless of whether these winners were picked by editors or readers, one thing is certain: All these awards recognize products and services that are considered the best of the best in their respective categories.
By presenting our Community Choice and Editors' Best award picks next to each other this year, we're hoping we'll encourage some dialogue about the selections that were made. Do you agree with the choices our editors have made? Or do the picks that our readers have made carry more weight? Please let us know what you think by emailing us your comments, or by visiting our online forums and writing a post or two.
Read on for our winners!
Best Free or Open Source IT Tool
Editors' Best
Gold: Spiceworks—Spiceworks (www.spiceworks.com)
Silver: PowerGUI—Quest Software (www.powergui.org)
Bronze: Truecrypt—Truecrypt (www.truecrypt.com)
"Spiceworks is arguably the best of a new breed of free, web-based services for IT pros that combine impressive feature sets with active, online communities of active IT pros." —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro
"Designing and configuring a full-blown SNMP-based network management system (NMS) console can be an expensive and time-consuming process. Spiceworks eliminates the tedium and lowers the up-front cost by delivering an NMS console as a web service hosted offsite." —Mel Beckman, contributing editor, SQL Server Magazine
"There are a lot of PowerShell scripting and GUI tools on the market these days, but PowerGUI remains one of the best, and it's free!" —Jeff James, editor in chief, Windows IT Pro
Community Choice
Gold: Sysinternals Suite—Microsoft (www.microsoft.com)
Silver: Adobe Reader—Adobe (www.adobe.com)
Bronze: AVG Free—AVG Technologies (www.avg.com)
Quotes from the Windows IT Pro community about Microsoft's Sysinternals Suite …
"You might not need all of these tools, but the ones you do need are absolutely essential."
"No IT pro can afford to be without these tools."
"A must-have collection for the serious admin."