My master thesis is about software for small business. I am trying to find out the problems what small businesses have and analyze these problems and find the solutions. In the outcome I will suggest some good software solutions to small businesses. To get more information about this field it would be good if you give answer to my little survey.
Benefits for you from my work:
- Cost reduction by using right software for your needs
- Solutions to problems you didn’t know before
- New software solutions which will make your work easier
There are different ways to get a web page for your small business:
- Hire a company or a specialist to deal with your web page
- Use Internet software where you only need to include your text and media to complete your webpage.
- Buy hosting service and install your own web page software.
If you really don’t know nothing about IT and you plan to hire somebody I suggest to first look at Edicy. It is so easy to make a web page. You log into Edicy and add your text, pictures and your site is ready. If your business doesn’t need some special web applications and functions it should be enough for you. It is a free servcice, but if you buy Edicy Pro you can use your domain name too. For example www.softforsmallbusiness.com
You have a business and you need to do exact things to complete your business processes. To find right software for your small business you can do following:
- Write down all the tasks you must complete to provide your service/product to customer. Like “send e-mail to shop” “order wood from shop”
- Underline the most important tasks without your business wouldn’t work.
- Search from Google using your “important task name” software.
- Look which features different software provides and pick some of them out.
- Now find out which one from this list helps to complete the most number of tasks from your list.
- Try the demo or trial version!
- If they don’t provide demo version, just ask them for it.
- If you like the software and price is right you should buy it.
- Remember that there is always free software on the market. So if you have a very low budget you can search from Google like this “important task name” open source software.
If you write down your tasks and search information you can find solutions to problems you didn’t even know before. Give it a try.
Nowadays you must be in social media or anybody doesn’t know you even exist! So I created group into Facebook Software for small business. Now I also have a twitter account @softwarefor. You can show support and follow software for small business in social media.
Thank you.
You definitely use a computer in your business and you have some documents and other important data. The computers are fragile and the most important thing is to backup your data. It is wise to copy important information to external hard drive, flash drive or write it on DVD.
I also use one useful tool for backup called DropBox. It is easy to use. You install it and you have one folder on your desktop where you copy your important files. Dropbox copies them automatically to their server and if you work with different computers then Dropbox can synchronise files between all your computers. In Dropbox there are also Public folder. If you copy files there you can easily copy link to this file and share it to your friends.
We are in business and therefore we need to protect our data. If you backup your sensitive data it would be wise to encrypt it before. You can get free software AxCrypt to encrypt all your data . You will find all the information from that site. One thing to bear in mind with data encryption. Remember the passwords, otherwise you can’t decrypt your data and it would be unusable.
I also made video to show how easy is to use Dropbox:
First we need an operating system for your computer. Windows OS is well known and everybody uses it. However if you are small business with small budget and you don’t use some extra special software it is wise to use the free operating system. I hope you have heard about Linux operating systems.
Linux is a free Unix-type operating system originally created by Linus Torvalds with the assistance of developers around the world. Yes. It is totally FREE and legal. In the beginning Linux systems were difficult to use and only an advanced computer users used them. Nowadays these kind of operating systems are very user friendly and easy to use.
There are lot of Linux distributions and the most popular ones you can find from here. I have personally used Ubuntu because it has a good documentation and a big community. It is really easy to install this operating system. Just download it and write to a cd and put it in your CD drive. From there you will follow an easy wizard to install Ubuntu. I am sure that you can do it. You can find more information from www.ubuntu.com
Before going over to Linux system you should keep in mind the two important things for small business owner:
- You should check if you use the software which only works in Windows operating system.
- There is no Microsoft Office for Linux. OpenOffice for Linux can open MS Office files, but OpenOffice may show them differently. If you have some important documents I advise to install OpenOffice for Windows firstly and check out your doucments.
I made a little video using Ubuntu to show you how easy it is to use it.
Hello. I have two little internet companies and for that I need some programs. Right now I use Google apps, but Google’s software doesn’t satisfy all my needs. Therefore I decided to read blogs about new web applications and SaaS software to find interesting software which I can use for my businesses. I also thought that there are other small business owners who could use this kind of information and I started a blog about it.
Todays world SaaS is very important service for small businesses. SaaS – Software as a Service. In human language you pay for using some kind of web based program. You don’t need to buy any server or install the software to your computer. You pay some fee every month and get the needed service. Very convenient. I also think that SaaS is the future path to follow, so you will see lot of posts about this kind of software.