I was recently talking to a software developer friend of mine about a project he was working on. I will spare you the details of the project and the companies involved, but I will tell you it’s a multi-million dollar project that your tax dollars are paying for. One of the main obstacles his team was facing was transporting data from one user to another within the software they were developing. There was an entire sub-team within the project team devoted to this issue, and the best they had come up with for their demos to the client was to enter the other person’s IP address directly in a settings file with the computers directly connected. While I’m sure (or at least I hope) this isn’t their final solution, how un-user friendly! This got me thinking; why not just make the entire solution a web-based application? When would you actually want a software solution versus a web solution? A web-based solution was definitely a viable (and probably better) option for this particular project.
Web-based applications have many advantages over software solutions. All users can benefit from a central data source that would always be up to date among all users, instead of users specifically sending segments of data to each other. Even if they wanted to send segments between users, a web-solution would make this an easy task. As business needs change and evolve, it would also be much easier to update a central web-based application rather than trying to update software on thousands of computers.
With today’s rich and interactive Web 2.0 user interfaces, a web solution can also offer the same amount of interactivity and responsiveness that a software solution can in almost all cases, while taking full advantage of the internet. Take, for example, Google Docs. With Google Docs (which is free!) you can create and edit Documents, Presentations, Spreadsheets, and more all online. (Can you say Word, PowerPoint, and Excel in a free, web-based environment?) You can even import, edit, and save files that were created in the software-based counterparts. Best of all, with their nice Web 2.0 interface, you don’t even realize you’re not using Microsoft’s $400 software package! All this along with additional features such as sharing files with others, publishing, and a plethora of other additional features not available in the rigid software solutions.
Screen shot of some of Google Doc's Web-Based Apps
With the benefits web solutions have over software solutions and with web-technology moving forward so quickly, will everything be a web-based solution within the next few years? Well… I may be biased, I’m a web developer. =) Sure, software has its place, but web applications are quickly taking over many business functions that were only possible with a software solution in the past. Is your business taking full advantage of the web and web-based applications?
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