The computer has become essential to our daily lives. We use it to check our e-mails, read the latest news online, chat with our friends, watch videos, listen to music and design our own personal projects, among many other things. Of course, the PC has also reached the working environments and developers around the world have released a great number of web applications for virtually every kind of business out there. Since the offer is insanely vast, every businessman should consider the available options before implementing any of them.
All the programs have pros and cons which should be weighed thoughtfully: a wrong choice and the productivity may hit the floor. There are some top web applications that most of worldwide businesses use (as confirmed by a recent report by Palo Alto Networks): web mail services, instant messaging clients, social networks and more. But, are they really useful? And more importantly, are they productive enough?
Let’s start by taking a look to the web mail services. This is the preferred tool for corporate users to communicate with each other in a professional way. Since the launch of Gmail, the Google service’s has become one of the most widely used apps at work, given its numerous features (great storage capacity, community-driven spam system, integrated chat with voice support) that turn out to be very useful in such an environment. Besides, the mail service from Google provides users with a list of tools to neatly organize their messages. There are other web mail services (such as Hotmail and Yahoo Mail) which are pretty good for personal use but they lack relevant features for a working environment.
As for the instant messaging apps, Yahoo! Messenger is the most used throughout the globe. Simple enough, this IM program doesn’t require a great deal of hardware resources and it provides the basic functionalities needed in the business field. Most companies rely on private solutions for their instant messaging needs but they should consider Yahoo! Messenger, since it is a fantastic (and free) alternative. Other options (such as Facebook Chat and Windows Live Messenger) are available and they may seem right at first glance but they include some features that might impact the workers’ productivity (Facebook Chat is embedded onto the site, which could distract their users; Windows Live Messenger includes lots of unnecessary features and it requires too much system resources).