You have now decided that you want to be your own boss and to set up your own business. Since you have no prior experience of business or entrepreneurship, you have decided to take advantage of a franchise opportunity. This enables you to act as an extended arm of the franchisor and you can count on all the support and resources that he can provide. You also have the advantage of a strong brand name and outstanding sales and marketing support. In fact, the franchise arrangement provides you with everything up to business cards and stationery. Unfortunately, the one area in which the franchise arrangement will not support you is in the area of setting up your office and your systems. You have to personally evaluate the options and make the decisions. The traditional choice of a suite of office software would have been Microsoft Office, but you should now seriously consider Google Apps. Google apps is a browser-based collection of all the office tools that you would require such as word processing, spreadsheets, e-mail and calendar. This is the first serious integrated attempt at Software as a Service, where you access software services as you would act as a utility like electricity and pay for it accordingly. You are saved the investment of a hardware infrastructure and all you need is a personal computer to access these software services over the Internet. The service is cheap at $50 a year compared to the $500 that you would pay for Microsoft office. In addition the support for email and the services would probably save you more money. All the data is stored on the Google server and is accessible to you and your associates via a personal computer. You also have no worries about data loss or data backup. On the minus side, privacy is an issue and storing all your vital business data is a major issue of trust. In addition, regulatory compliance issues may force you to store some of your own data. At the end of the day, it is up to you to decide whether you want desktop-based systems or browser-based systems.