Most small businesses achieve increases in productivity using desktop software. As businesses mature much of that production workflow can be delegated to specialized applications called line of business applications (LOB). These applications all work to provide an umbrella of functions, so that much to all of the small business' client and work management needs are addressed by the screens of this LOB application. Every industry has its favorites, but applications that Liberteks has supported include:
Medical - Dentrix
Legal - Lexis
Retail - QuickCharge
One of the benefits of most LOB applications is they come with recommended system requirements for their installation, and successful data sharing among team members. A good line of business application can be thought of as a great employee. They come to work every day, get the job done, and report what business owners need to know. Often these application are called vertical market LOB’s as every industry (vertical market) has it’s own solution vendors.
On the other hand, everyone runs productivity applications that are general purpose in nature. These are often called horizontal applications since these programs provide basic functionality to all small businesses. Some examples that Liberteks has supported are :
Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook)
Intuit Quick books
Adobe CS
One of the limits caused by the general nature of these programs is they come with system requirements to run the program, but responsibility for determining where to keep shared data, how to properly backup, etc. are not included with the general productivity application.
So these are the two ends of the application choices for small businesses. As a result most small businesses do not have work local or remote backups, nor do they have application vendor best practices in how they share general productivity files. This leads to lost files, a high cost in organizing files, and many redundant copies of data.
Is there a way to manage this small business problem in general? After all there are so many types of small businesses and so many programs that they can use to get the job done. At Liberteks we applied our GBB methodology to create three discrete storage solutions for small businesses -- "Good," "Better" and "Best." Check out our recommendations and let us know what you think.
Tags: cloud computing, data sharing, data transfer, Dentrix, Intuit Quick books, Lexis, line of business applications (LOB), LOB, Microsoft Office, QuickCharge
