Go For a More Mobile Office in 2010

How much mon­ey do you spend on ser­vic­ing your Servers each year? How many times do you have to call up your com­put­er guru and say, ​“My email is not work­ing?” or ​“My Quick­books file was corrupted.”

Com­put­er hard­ware and soft­ware are a bless­ing to us and many times a curse. Almost every small busi­ness own­er I have spo­ken with has spend many hours of frus­tra­tion and lots of mon­ey fix­ing their com­put­ers. In 2010, I have a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion for you to con­sid­er: Make your office more mobile or online accessible.

Com­put­er pro­gram­mers and soft­ware engi­neers have been work­ing extra hard the past cou­ple of years to cre­ate online soft­ware for small and large busi­ness­es. Graph­ic design­ers have put the fin­ish­ing touch­es to make the pro­grams user friend­ly. For exam­ple, ACT! soft­ware dom­i­nat­ed the small busi­ness mar­ket for qual­i­ty Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) soft­ware. Now com­pa­nies such as Sales­force, Sug­ar­CRM, and Zoho have made easy to use and cus­tomiz­able CRM pro­grams avail­able online. They offer stor­age, added secu­ri­ty, acces­si­bil­i­ty and trou­ble-free usabil­i­ty for a small month­ly fee. Quick­books, the #1 sell­ing small busi­ness account­ing sys­tem, now offers a very easy to use online ver­sion. Some accoun­tants were not hap­py with the usabil­i­ty a few years ago, but in 2009, QB online is def­i­nite­ly a per­fect option for small busi­ness own­ers. They have made it very easy to use!

Final­ly, because most busi­ness own­ers have been cut­ting back on per­son­nel and over­head, a mobile office is def­i­nite­ly the way to go! iPhone, Black­ber­ry and Droid ver­sions of account­ing, sched­ul­ing, CRM and more are hit­ting the mar­ket­ing almost every month. Going mobile should def­i­nite­ly decrease the amount of times you need to con­tact your IT per­son. It will make you far more pro­duc­tive and low­er your stress too!

If you have mobile office and online soft­ware ques­tions, feel free to email me!