All-in-One Business Solution

Mar 14, 2014 | by Travis Hill

If you work for a small business, this will probably sound familiar: “We need a cloud solution to manage our projects, handle workflow, and share documents between sales and marketing. We have a tight deadline, but I’m sure you can do it. I know some of the functionality is custom, but we don’t have the resources to bring in a third party vendor.”

Here’s the problem for small businesses: If you’re focusing on IT projects and software solutions, you’re not focusing on business. It’s a difficult reality for SMBs because you need exceptional business systems to stay relevant, but licensing solutions from multiple vendors to fill your business needs just costs too much. These are real problems for real companies, and they send CTOs scrambling for a magical all-in-one business solution.

SMBs Move to the Cloud

Large companies can afford server farms to support their data, files and websites. Small companies aren’t so lucky, so they have migrated to the cloud. Fortunately, the cloud comes with other advantages besides saving money and resources, like ubiquitous access to data better storage and recovery.

Unfortunately, migrating to the cloud sounds complicated.

Fortunately, Kintone collaboration software creator and customization functionality makes it a snap.

Here are the steps:

First sign up for a free trial. Then:

Add ready-to-use apps from the Marketplace to your secure workspace with literally a mouse click. Import your data from either CSV or Excel format into your Kintone online apps.
Invite colleagues, partners, anyone you want, to collaborate in your workspace.
Open an app and click Customize, and start using the drag-and-drop interface to update it for your business needs.

For small businesses especially, an all-in-one cloud solution provides a host of benefits:

Application integration: A best-in-class cloud business solution provider automatically integrates all your business application for data sharing and organization. Integrating multiple systems is time-consuming at best, often riddled with obstacles, and frequently never works right.
In-line communication: The ability to add in-context comments keeps everyone up to date and alleviates feelings of isolation. The ease of use can take the place of “water cooler” discussions, helping to fuel innovation.
Consistency: All apps run in the same system for similar ease of use and automatic integration.
Efficiency: Signing into multiple systems can be time-consuming and irritating. SSO (single sign-on) saves time and can help elevate employee morale. Entrepreneur Magazine recently suggested that small increases in time management can increase productivity up to 28%1.
Storage and recovery: Cloud storage makes data available anytime, anywhere, and makes data recovery much easier.
Cost: One business solution is less expensive than licensing a different solution for each business function.

There are some things to look out for if you’re in the market for an all-in-one business solution for your company:

Best-in-class security: Your data can be hacked from anywhere, even your local computer. So when you’re trusting your data to a third party, make sure it has ISO 27001 certification and redundancy.
Downtime: Make sure your third-party provider doesn’t experience frequent unscheduled periods of down time when you can’t access your system.

Fortunately, small businesses are usually the ones to introduce and start using disruptive technologies that become the magical all-in-one solutions like Kintone all-in-one cloud business solutions. Kintone includes more than two dozen business applications, most free and included in the Kintone Marketplace. Drag-and-drop form builders enable you to customize your apps for virtually any business purpose without IT resources or third-party vendors. Kintone also comes with unbeatable cloud security and no unscheduled downtime ever.

Learn more about the benefits and drawbacks of an all-in-one cloud business platform for your business. Then come visit us and take a free trial.