Google Puts Spotlight on Web Apps for Small Business Week

For National Small Business Week, Google has highlighted several web apps from the Google Apps Marketplace that businesses are using and how they’re using them.  

"As compared to larger businesses, small businesses are even less suited to managing servers, and tend to have many employees on the road or in non-office locations," says Joanne Schneider of the Google Apps Small Business. "Accessing their data and documents from anywhere, on any Internet-connected device is a core benefit of using web-based tools like Google Docs."

Among the apps getting the spotlight are Olark and WORKetc. Olark lets users chat with site visitors from the Gmail interface, using Google Talk. Obviously something like this can be quite useful for customer service. 

WORKetc. also utilizes Gmail, but is more CRM and project management related, though it can also be used for customer support. You can share emails related to certain projects with the relevant team members without forwarding or copying other email addresses .

"Particularly for companies without a dedicated IT team or person, the list of necessary business tools can quickly become unmanageable," says Schneider. "Web apps that provide deep integrations with Google Apps and with each other are especially useful for growing businesses that don’t have time to manage multiple, distinct applications."

Google actually highlights quite a few apps in the finance, CRM, Doc Management, Collaboration, and Sales/Marketing categories here. If you’re a Google Apps user, you’ll probably find some of these helpful.