Productivity Software That Is Customized For Specific Industries

There are all kinds of productivity software out there. The best way to determine what kind you need is by considering your specific industry and goals. If you’re an accounting firm, for example, accounting software will help your team keep track of how long it takes particular projects to pay off in the form of profits. If you’re a customer service company, CRM programs will help you track everything from customer satisfaction surveys to customer service calls so that nothing falls through the cracks. Once you’ve determined which productivity software is right for your business needs, use our Productivity Guide to get some great ideas on how to customize it!

In this guide, we review the aspects of Productivity Software That Is Customized For Specific Industries, best productivity software for small business, What software is most commonly associated with productivity, and Is DOS a productivity software?

Productivity Software That Is Customized For Specific Industries

Productivity software is a great way to boost productivity and efficiency in the workplace. There are many different types of productivity software that can be used by different industries. For example, accounting firms use accounting software, while customer service companies rely on CRM programs to keep track of their customers’ needs. If you’re looking for more specific ways to customize your business with productivity software, read this article!

Productivity software has many different uses, which aren’t always specific to one industry.

You might think that productivity software is only for a specific industry, but that’s not always the case. Productivity software can be customized to meet the needs of certain industries, as well.

For example, project management (PM) software systems are designed to help businesses better manage their projects and employees by integrating time tracking and scheduling with customer relationship management functionality. PM software might be used by developers who work on large-scale projects with multiple stakeholders and deadlines that need to be monitored closely in order to stay on target; it could also be used by companies who want more visibility into their overall progress towards meeting client goals or internal deadlines.

When choosing which type of PM system you want for your business, it’s important to consider various factors before making your decision—for example: how many users you need? What kind of data will you enter into the system? What kind of reports do you need? And so on… After all these questions have been answered satisfactorily, then it’s time we get down into specifics about what makes one particular product stand out among others—and this list below details some key considerations when looking at some popular choices!

Word and Excel are two of the most popular programs that come with Microsoft Office productivity suites.

Microsoft Office is a suite of programs that includes Word and Excel. The two most popular programs that come with Microsoft Office are Word and Excel, respectively. Both of these programs work similarly to Google Docs, but they also have many features unique to their own software.

While you can use Google Docs for a wide range of projects, the two main benefits of using Microsoft Office instead include:

compatibility between different Apple or Android devices; 2) access to other file types besides .docx or .xlsx files (for example, you can create a Microsoft Powerpoint presentation directly from within Word).

Accounting is one industry where productivity software can be used.

You can use accounting software to manage payments and expenses, analyze financial data and keep track of budgets. It can also be used to manage inventory, track client information and create invoices.

Customer relationship management software, or CRM, is another example of business productivity software.

CRM software is another example of business productivity software. It’s used to manage your customer relationships and interactions, including sales and prospecting activities. CRM is often integrated with other business tools like accounting or marketing automation platforms.

CRM software can be used by a variety of industries including retail, healthcare, hospitality—anywhere you want to keep track of customers’ interactions with your brand so that you can get them back again in the future.

Enterprise resource planning software, or ERP, is another type of productivity software for businesses.

ERP is a type of business productivity software that is used to plan and manage resources. ERP software can be customized to meet the specific needs of an industry, and many different types of businesses use ERP software—from oil refineries and airlines to manufacturing firms and retailers.

Productivity software can be customized for specific industries in order to meet business needs.

Productivity software is a powerful tool for businesses, and it’s used in many different industries. However, productivity tools are often customized for specific industries to meet the business needs of that industry.

Productivity software can be used to track time, manage projects and organize information. Some examples of productivity software for different industries include:

Accounting: TimelyBooks (for accounting), ProjectManager.com (for project management)
Construction: Procore (for construction), TSheets (for time tracking)

best productivity software for small business

Running a small business means handling an endless onslaught of tasks and juggling multiple – sometimes competing – priorities. Staying organized, focused and sane through it all is challenging for every small business owner. Fortunately, productivity apps make it easier for you and your team to get things done.

When you let these programs drive the day-to-day busywork, you can use the extra time you’ve earned back to focus on growing your business and satisfying customers. We’ve rounded up some of the best productivity apps that can be a useful part of your company’s software solution set and broken them down into categories.

Project management apps

1. Asana

Asana is a project management tool and business productivity app aimed at helping teams stay focused on goals and hit their deadlines. Asana integrates goal-setting with a deadline schedule, so you can create projects, establish goals, and manage each step of the process. Asana is also a great solution for task management, as you can create different boards to shift tasks as they are completed or communicate with team members in threads under each task. In addition, Asana provides tools to visualize where staffers are in a project, like project timelines and a team calendar view.

As a productivity tool, Asana provides small business owners with the ability to manage all their important tasks and goals in one place. It integrates with other workplace apps, such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace. Asana provides a free Basic version with limited features for individual entrepreneurs and smaller teams of up to 15 people. Those who want to unlock custom fields, task dependencies and templates, Gantt charts, guest access, and more can explore Premium, Business and Enterprise plans aimed at larger organizations.

Asana key features

Asana pricing

2. Basecamp

Basecamp is a go-to collaboration solution for many organizations. You can manage projects, your team and company-wide communication. Each designated project features different sections to help you facilitate processes: a to-do list, message board, schedule, place to save files and “campfire” chat for general team communication. Threads are a pillar of the Basecamp model. They allow you to receive updates on the progress of an individual project or discussion at a glance. Basecamp also offers a “company HQ” section that is visible across the organization and allows managers to schedule automatic check-ins with their team. This eliminates the need for repetitive status update meetings. [Check out our top picks for online project management software like Basecamp.]

Basecamp is more expensive than some other solutions, but the company argues its features and capabilities make it a complete platform, as opposed to using a combination of other tools. Basecamp Business is available for $99 per month, with a free 30-day trial so you can determine if it’s the right fit for your company. There is also a free Personal plan that is limited to 3 projects and 20 users.

Basecamp key features

Basecamp pricing

3. monday.com

Monday.com is a powerful project management and customer relationship management (CRM) tool that brings all your tasks, projects and client information into one place, facilitating cross-team collaboration and communication. You can easily create custom project dashboards, set up product roadmaps, manage your team’s workload, and save precious time by automating repetitive tasks.

Real-time updates on your team’s activity, automation features and integrations with third-party services make monday.com a productivity favorite. This app maintains a clear timeline of each project and creates knowledge bases where you can store documents and other information related to your projects. Monday.com has a variety of plans for businesses, including a limited Free plan available for up to two users.

monday.com key features

monday.com pricing

Did you know?: In addition to being one of the best project management tools, monday.com has earned spots in our roundups of the best CRM software and best email marketing services.

4. Trello

Trello is a great productivity app for process-based projects and tasks. Using Trello involves creating boards and advancing tasks between stages with a simple drag-and-drop method. It’s a quick, easy and visual way to understand where your team members are in the process. You can assign tasks, set priorities, add attachments, leave comments, and connect to other productivity apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Workspace. You can also create individual boards for each project. Trello has a free tier, as well as Standard, Premium and Enterprise plans.

Tip: If you want a basic way to track task progress, create “To Do,” “In Progress” and “Done” boards. Drag-and-drop your tasks into each place as they go through the different stages.

Trello key features

Trello pricing

Note taking apps

5. OneNote

Microsoft OneNote is a robust yet simple note-taking app. It’s a great solution for business owners who need to compile a lot of information on various projects in one place. Its intuitive notebook layout makes breaking topics or projects into pages and sections easy, and the program provides a lot of smart features. For example, if you copy and paste a quote from an online source, OneNote automatically includes the URL so you can reference it later. OneNote is also stylus-friendly, so on devices like an iPad, Surface or capable tablet, you can ditch pen and paper to take notes or mark up your material. The notes are shared across the team, so you can easily brainstorm and collaborate on your projects and tasks.

OneNote is free, with an Office 365 subscription required for deeper integration with the rest of the suite.

Did you know?: Microsoft OneNote uses your OneDrive storage, so if you happen to exceed the free 5GB limit, you can increase it to 100GB for an additional fee.

What software is most commonly associated with productivity

eed a computer program to make a graph, but drawing the graph would be very time consuming and would take away from class time that could be better spent learning other important lessons. The time issue in the situation is a prefect example of why productivity tools are so important. They allow us to increase the amount of information that teachers teach their students in less time than ever before. PowerPoint is another great example of productivity software. A teacher could stand up in front of the classroom and lecture to a group of tenth graders and hope that they pick out the important details from her lecture, but this is highly unlikely. Specifying verbatim what they want the student to write down is tedious and also very time consuming.

On the other hand, PowerPoint enables teachers to make slides of their notes and project them onto a screen so that everyone can copy word for word what the teacher wants them to learn. So what is the difference between using a regular projector with individual transparencies and PowerPoint? The answer is time and efficiency. The teacher no longer has to spend ample time moving the transparency down so that the children in the back can see what is at the bottom of the page, or take time to put down away, get out another, and readjust the projector so that it isn’t blurry. All of those time taking frustrations vanish when using PowerPoint. A teacher is able to go through her slides quickly with ease. She could even add pictures or links to show and support the data that she is teaching to the class.

The PowerPoint system is also a lot easier to read because it can be made in large fonts without the worry of wasting transparences, which also allows everyone to view and read the teacher important facts. Inspiration and Kidspiration are another great example of how children can us technology to interact and learn a curriculum. These two programs allow teachers to design their own activity for their students to finish. By performing the activity themselves they are not only learning the information required, but they are interacting with the information which will make a much longer lasting impression on the students.

Students can site and memorize material until their head turns blue, but until they minds are stimulated and have a desire to learn these facts or tools for life, they will not completely understand the information. Productivity tools stimulate a students mind using color, pictures, graphs, activities and so much more. It is not what a child learns in a lesson, but what he or she takes out of it and is able to apply to everyday life, and Productivity software enhances the impression of the lesson on the student.

Is DOS a productivity software?

From the archives: Open source MS-DOS alternative lives—but using it nearly killed me.

Now 27 years after Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS, we’re resurfacing this exercise (and very much appreciating our present day options as we all work from home a bit more). This story originally ran on July 3, 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

Twenty years ago this week, as Microsoft announced that it would end support for the MS-DOS operating system, James Hall announced to the world that he intended to create a public domain version of the OS in order to keep the universe of character-based DOS software alive. Hall’s “PD-DOS” project eventually became FreeDOS, which today supports an ecosystem of developers, retro gamers, and diehards who will give up their WordStar when you pry the floppies from their cold, dead fingers.

Why FreeDOS?

Linux is free, too, and I’d rather spend any day working on an aging laptop running Debian or Ubuntu than working from the DOS command prompt. But there’s a certain insane beauty to the austerity of FreeDOS—plus, it’s an operating system that can boot from a floppy disk and run in 640KB of memory with no sweat (though it can go beyond that limit with one of several open source “high-memory” extenders).

FreeDOS has dressed up the old DOS environment a bit; for instance, with the addition of FAT32 support, FreeDOS can today support drives up to 8TB in size. An add-in module called LFNDOS adds support for the long filenames introduced in Windows 95. And thanks to a small army of open source developers and to the intellectual property gifts of two decades of commercial and academic DOS development, FreeDOS has compilers for dozens of programming languages (though, as far as I can tell, Java is not one of them).

At one point, FreeDOS became the only DOS that shipped with major PC brands, but you had to ask for it. Dell and Hewlett-Packard shipped FreeDOS with their “no operating system” machines as an alternative to Windows preconfigurations, and it became a popular option on cheap PCs, particularly in Asia, late in the last decade. The OS is still listed on the Dell and HP websites, but it seems that the option to have it shipped with new PCs is no longer available through those companies’ Web stores.

Despite its decline, FreeDOS continues to have an active user community. It’s still used as a lightweight OS for “boot floppies” needed to do network startups, to install or repair other operating systems, or to perform firmware updates. Because of its low memory and storage footprint, FreeDOS has also found a home in the virtual machine world, with ready-made images available for a variety of desktop and server VM environments.

But as was always the case with DOS, some assembly is required to get things running just right.

Building an Internet-friendly DOS

The official current version (FreeDOS version 1.1, released in 2011) is available as a live CD image, but the default installation lacks many of the pieces you’ll need to connect to the 21st-century Internet—including network drivers. Fortunately, another CD image is available that contains all the repository packages, including a couple of network driver options that can be installed with the FreeDOS Package Manager (FDNPKG).

I opted to install most of the packages, starting with the Crynwr packet driver—a freeware networking driver set that works with most standard network cards from the DOS era. Many DOS applications that use TCP/IP use a TCP library rather than a system driver, and FreeDOS has two that are compatible with the Crynwr packet driver: mTCP, still supported and accompanied by a handful of utilities (including an IRC client), and the venerable Waterloo TCP (WATTCP) developed in the early 1990s. The mTCP library has even been used to build a Web server—its home page is served up from an IBM PCjr.

You can also find “terminate-stay-resident” drivers for TCP/IP and other networks, which you’ll need for network file sharing. But to make them work, you’ll have to play hunter-gatherer with all the component parts, as most of these were commercial and are now unsupported. Someone on the VirtualBox forums has done a lot of that work already, fortunately. I took an alternate route: I ran FTP on my Mac OS X host and used the mTCP FTP client to shuttle files over to the DOS client. That allowed me to rather quickly add to my toolkit for a day of DOS productivity.

The land of “abandonware”

Next, I needed some content creation software. If I was so inclined, I could have foregone the luxury of a word processor and just used the FreeDOS EDIT.EXE tool or one of the many ported open source text tools. But if you’re looking for something a little closer to the “modern Office” experience, Microsoft Word 5.5 for DOS is available for free.

Before Microsoft won the desktop wars, word processors had devout followings. George R.R. Martin reportedly still uses WordStar, which I used briefly in the mid-1980s—it came bundled with my Kaypro PC. But to me, there was no other choice than the reassuring default deep blue of WordPerfect 5; I still have the function key template burned into my retinas. Fortunately, Lee Hutchinson happened to still have a copy.

Next came the choice of a spreadsheet. Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc? Both are freely available off the Web. The executable version of VisiCalc that its developer, Dan Bricklin, has posted online is the original version for the IBM PC, created in 1981. Its user interface is a little primitive, but considering that it’s only a 27.5KB file—smaller than the Word document that I created to write this story—it’s a study in elegance.I don’t print things much anymore, so I didn’t have to dive into the world of printer drivers.

Unfortunately, you might as well send someone the Dead Sea scrolls as anything saved in the native file formats of these ancient spreadsheets—unless your recipients happen to have Apache OpenOffice, in which case you can send them a 1-2-3 .WK1 file, by all means.

Finally, to round out my software set, I found a .ZIP file of Ashton Tate’s dBase III and built a quick contact database. My inner Clipper programmer was happy again.

The Internet of 1994

But the thing is—I work for a website. And there was the small matter of actually using the Web from DOS.

Yes, Virginia, there is a DOS-based Web browser that’s still in development, and it’s open source. Arachne, which was most recently updated a year ago and is licensed under the GPL, is a full screen graphical browser that has its own built-in TCP/IP stack along with SLIP/PPP support (for those still in the world of dial-up). It even has a built-in POP/SMTP mail client, albeit a fairly primitive one.

Arachne is stable, but it’s hardly in tune with the requirements of the modern Web. For one thing, there’s no support for HTTPS, so Google, Twitter, Yahoo, and all those sites that have moved to SSL encryption in the post-Snowden era are unreachable. (Thank Bill there’s still Bing, right?) Also, it supports only the most basic of CSS style sheets, so modern websites look a little less modern. And while the mail client works, attaching files requires a bit of finesse.

I also tried Dillo, another open source browser based on FLTK, a cross-platform GUI library, which behaves like Mozilla 4.0. FLTK provides a Windows 2.0-like GUI experience. I managed to get it to work with Google (after turning off image downloads), but the mouse support was iffy, and it crashed and burned several times while loading pages.

After some pain and suffering with Arachne, I found what appeared to be a more robust mail client, called FlMail, based on the same FLTK library as Dillo. FlMail appears to support SSL, and it works with Gmail and other webmail services that support POP and SMTP. But making the mistake of clicking on an HTML-formatted message in my mailbox sent FlMail into a “preformating [sic] page” loop that gave me reason to go brew another pot of coffee. Sending a message with the first draft of this article attached? The same thing happened, before finding that the send failed. So I fled back to Arachne.

Killing things, coding things

I tried to share my pain via Twitter. Sadly, there’s no DOS Twitter client. When I tried to command-line tweet using WGET, Twitter.com wouldn’t resolve—I couldn’t figure out which network stack it was supposed to use, so I just wrote myself a reminder on a Post-It note.

Soon, I was going through copy/paste withdrawal, and it was time for a break. So I started searching through the games I had downloaded. One of the attractions for gamers offered by FreeDOS is its collection of emulators. There are a dozen or so DOS versions of classic consoles, including the NES, Gameboy, and Atari 800.

I had also installed a free mod of Doom, called (imaginatively) FREEDOOM, and I spent some time running around pixelated hell, blasting monsters. There were also two versions of Tetris, and a Mario-like side-scroller called HappyLand that I… really didn’t know what to make of. A DOS Space Invaders clone blew up the system every time I tried to load it.

After leaving a trail of VGA blood, I took a look at the developer tools. The GNU Compiler Collection was ported to FreeDOS as DJGPP. It allows for the creation of 32-bit programs that execute from DOS, and it was updated in March 2012 to include the Go programming language in addition to C, C++, and Fortran. It also includes the RHIDE integrated development environment. There are a few dozen other free and open source compilers and runtime environments as well, including one released earlier this year for the FORTH language.

Of course, there’s a lot of abandonware available for developers as well. Just for the sake of nostalgia, I downloaded Turbo Pascal and Harbour, an open-source Clipper compiler. As soon as I get my DOS contact manager app debugged, I’ll post a link to it.

At the end of the day, I was very ready to return to the comfort of a modern operating system—any modern operating system, thank you. But I did see why there’s still interest in DOS after all these years. Despite its archaic limitations, FreeDOS can turn even the oldest PC hardware into a functioning member of the Internet world, and it keeps decades of software up and running.

Productivity Software That Is Customized For Specific Industries