Simply Manage Business Information

How do you manage business information? Is it a challenge, or a simple process built into the way you work? Most small businesses manage their business information the way they manage personal information – email, spreadsheets, calendar, sticky notes and a good slice of luck.

But that’s hard work. It creates stress and gets in the way of sales and customer service.

These days, storing business information on a personal computer complicates matters unnecessarily.  Sharing it with others requires expensive synchronisation.  It needs to be “backed up” at regular intervals.  It’s open to all those nasty viruses.  It’s tied to the device.

Anybody who’s suffered a busted hard drive, been infected by a trojan, or left a laptop on an airplane knows trying to recover the lost data is hard work.

Far better to store it on the Internet, hosted by companies with sophisticated security and fault tolerant hardware.  It makes sense to let the experts look after the data – especialy when that hosting costs virtually nothing. 

A properly constructed and hosted application increases the security of the data, reduces storage costs and makes it accessible to multiple users, anywhere there’s a web browser.

Front Office Box stores it’s data in industry standard MySQL databases hosted by Slicehost and Amazon.

That’s just the beginning of our Optimized Information Management.

Whilst we store the data in MySQL, the application is written in Ruby on Rails – the open source development environment preferred by the Agile development community.

Ruby makes it easy for us to connect our Intuitive User Interface with the data in a series of “views”.  These views are simply web pages.  Populating that page from the database is simple, as is using hyperlinks to connect the “view” to other “views”.  Clicking a persons name in the Company view switches the page to the People view.  Users just need to click a link and we repopulate the page with the appropriate data.

In designing Front Office Box we’ve worked hard at deciding which business information needs to be available in which view, and putting it there.

For example, when the customer calls it makes sense to have certain information readily available – company information, people related to the company, actions related to the company (completed and planned), correspondence, documents and notes.  Our Company vew has all this information presented on one page.  There’s no need to go hunting while the customer holds on.  Front Office Box saves users time while improving customer service. It doesn’t matter who in the office the customer talks to.  All of the information is available to everybody, on one page.

We’ve taken the same approach thoughout the application, building a business information system which presents all the insight you need (and only that) where you need to find it.