Network Solutions – Small business conversations and working together for small business success

The Small Business Web is Now Online and Connected

Being a small business has its share of challenges and one area that can be particularly frustrating is implementing back office tools to handle such things as invoicing, time tracking, project management, CRM and accounting.

As a small business owner myself I was particularly interested when back at SXSW a bunch of companies that included BatchBlue, Shoeboxed, Outright, Mailchimp and Freshbooks announced the “Small Business Web“. (Full Disclosure: There is partnership between Outright and Network Solutions and they have a blog called the Unintentional Entrepreneur.

The concept is simple, get these different web applications that business use talking to each other and streamline the data exchange so small businesses are more efficient and the combined products are more powerful.

Here is what it says on their web site:

“The Small Business Web is a movement to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. While there are many products available for small business owners on the Web, the approach we’re taking is to use each others APIs to provide a high-level of integration between these applications and create a more seamless experience for our customers.

We think small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy and that it’s from small business that true innovation will arise. We believe small businesses should have access to the same tools and technology that big companies have without paying a huge amount. We know simplifying access and increasing integration to our products and services will benefit all of our customers. We want small businesses to succeed and we want to help.”

The execution is challenging because companies have to open up their API’s and the connecting companies have to develop the functionality to plug-in that respective application. This can also be limited by what the respective company opens up their particular API. On top of that each company is well, its own company and there is no central control or product team to deal with integration issues.

Despite those challenges, the Small Business Web is starting to get some traction and more companies have joined in. The list is long and covers just about every area of a small business back office operation. There are actually more than one in each area freeing the small business owner to find the best solution for them and not tied to a specific group of apps like a desktop office productivity suite.

Those hours freed up from using spreadsheets to do double and sometime triple data entry allows a small business to focus on more important things to help them grow. We will be covering many more of these applications in future Smart Working articles.

For more information, check out the Small Business Web at http://www.thesmallbusinessweb.com

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