Okay, there's always a bit of skepticism that gets attached to product comparisons that a company provides. After all, it's not too tough to "cherry pick" the features that make you look good and your competitors look like inept buffoons. Don't think that's going to keep us from providing such a comparison, though.

We look at the comparison as far more than a lengthy list of features, though. It's far more important to judge how you work with the system than it is to trot out feature after feature after feature that you kind of wonder what use you'd have for anyway. And, let's face it, the more features that you have in something, the harder it tends to be to use. Apple didn't skip the FM receiver on iPods because it was too expensive, you know?

Did you ever wonder why you couldn't edit something on the same page that you were looking at? Or how you might need to bring up a pop-up window in order to select an email address when creating a mail? Who works like that in real life, anyway? Well, "old school" web application developers, apparently.

We see things a little differently. When we looked at a system design, it seemed a lot more sensible to edit data in place. To provide live search. To utilize modules, widgets and functions that the user can swap in and out at will, according to their view of how the system should work, not ours.

Tragically, these types of "real world" functions didn't exist for the web.

Fortunately, we wrote them.

Many other web applications are clumsy, un-intuitive, and hard to figure out. Systems that have Windows all over the place, data scattered hither and yon -- you're likely to need a road map to figure this jumble out. Never mind running your company, you're going to be knee deep in popup windows and user manuals before you ever start feeling productive assuming that you ever do. Elements SBM has some key key features that we believe are way ahead of everyone else in terms of technology, user interface, and workflow.

At its core, Elements was designed to be extendible, configurable and open to easy development. That means that new Elements applications can be plugged into the system and they're instantly available to every company that wants to use them. It means that new applications work with, and like, the existing applications, automatically. It means that needs unforeseen today can be addressed tomorrow, and you don't need to worry about leaving everything else behind to get new functionality.

At Ntractive, we envision Elements to be as much of a platform, as it is a great small business management application. So, you can count on us to keep making great tools that you can use to run, manage and improve your business, safe in the knowledge that, because they'll work, look and feel the same way as Elements SBM, your training, support and usage costs will stay low.

If a system gives you the ability to track a customer, but no way to see how that customer is impacting your bottom line, how helpful is that? If your marketing management software doesn't reflect current sales and finances, is it truly serving you best? And if your employees are using fifteen different programs to manage their jobs, contacts, email, web and so on, how productive are they really?

We gave that a lot of thought and built true workflow into Elements SBM. Work in sales? You'll have ripe contacts being funneled to you all day long through the Sales Contact widget. In finance or management? You'll love the real time reports that show the state of your business today, not what it was like last month (unless you'd like to see said previous month's report!) And everyone will love the handy contact management, internal (spam free!) email and notes collaboration system, and the other features to make everyday tasks easier.