With the availability of more and more enterprise level open-source applications, small-medium businesses ( SME ) can now afford some of the programs that are improving processes and efficiency in larger organizations. Programs include functions like customer support, business development, sales management, and lead management (SugarSales and XRMS CRM ),  Project Management (dotProject and Basecamp), and Accounting and ERP (webERP), News (any RSS aggregator), Calendaring (iCal standard) and of course, email (too many options to list).

The potential is now there to combine data from these programs to create an integrated view of marketing activities and performance on one web page.

This is possible because most of them use some kind of open standard, such as the PHP programming language or RSS. An advantage of this is that the weekly, monthly (ok, quarterly) marketing report is now available on an as-needed or daily basis. Measurements and ratios could be calculated on the page as well. In addition, the dashboard view tends to remind the user of the daily, weekly, and monthly marketing tasks to accomplish.

I would like to see Google Adwords and Overture open up their campaign perfomace data to be delivered via RSS also. And what kind of sustainable or green marketing data can we get ahold of? That's another blog entry in itself - what are the sustainable measures of your green marketing? And of your business? Can you think of any other improvements or additions?

By the way, if anyone wants us to integrate a system like the one described above, let us know.