Get your business running online

22 October 2008

Web applications are rapidly catching up with their more feature-filled desktop cousins. With the advent of small portable smartphones like the iPhone and Blackberry, wireless laptops, 3G and ever-faster broadband, consumers and business users alike are beginning to demand small, fast applications to use on the road or at home without the cost of yearly upgrades and all the bloated trappings of offerings like Microsoft Office.

Consumers can choose from a wide range of outstanding online applications: eBay, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Photoshop.com, Wordpress, MovableType. There are countless applications for recording and manipulating today's digitally-based lives and they are already firmly established in the day-to-day use of millions of computer users around the world. The immediate success of the iPhone Application Store has highlighted the demand for small, simple applications to be used on the road. Some of the immediate successes are surprisingly not games. They are applications like eBay Mobile, Traffic info, Facebook, Google Maps. People are beginning to integrate applications into their daily lives.

Business users are beginning to benefit from the online application community too. There are also countless online solutions for running a business. There are applications out there for everyone: From invoicing software, like BlinkSale, to fully featured sales CRM tools like HighRise, made by a tiny company called 37 Signals. They have a fantastically fresh approach to building software. This is evident in their publication called Getting Real. Their main application, and one we are starting to offer our clients as a service, is called BaseCamp.

BaseCamp is a web-based Project Management application. It is very simple; there aren't any charts or detailed timelines like you would get in larger applications like Microsoft Project or Merlin, but it simplifies the process and provides an extranet platform for online collaboration between an internal team and their customers. You can build calendars and identify milestones in a project, upload images and artwork, collaboratively write documents, group chat, and notify people via email when changes or deadlines have been met. We like it. In fact so much that we are now running a few projects on it internally and we think that some of our clients could definitely benefit in using it to keep track of more complex design projects.

Let us know if you think this would help your particular project.