News of a possible H1N1 virus, or “Swine Flu,” pandemic is causing many commercial firms and government agencies to examine their Continuity of Operations (COOP) plans so business can soldier on during the crisis. The threat of an H1N1 outbreak is even prompting the United States Centers for Disease Control to recommend that small businesses have telework and business continuity plans in place.

This could place even organizations with well developed telecommuting programs in a challenging position, because a major virus outbreak may mean that their remote worker needs exceed their current capacity.

On the flip side, there are organizations that are far from telecommuting-friendly, which face even more challenges because they aren’t set up for remote working. In order to keep their business running in such a crisis they are going to need to buy or build an infrastructure to meet a new model of working.

At WebWorkerDaily, we get a chance to review some of the best office productivity, social media, online collaboration, project management, and Web 2.0 tools that in a worst case scenario — like a pandemic outbreak — can help an organization maintain some semblance of operations and communications, even though its employees and contractors are working from home during the crisis.

Perhaps your organization already has a well-honed telecommuting policy, however it is prudent to look for chinks in your telecommuting plans before the worst case scenario happens. Here is a look at some tools and services you can use to keep business operations running.

Office Suites
While Microsoft Office (s msft) is probably your corporate standard, an extreme scenario like a pandemic outbreak could place your newly minted web workers on their home PCs or on a limited number of organization owned notebook PCs — there might not be enough Office licenses to cope with this scenario. This means you may need to consider web office solutions to make up the shortfall. Good choices include:

• Google Apps is a good choice for augmenting your corporate standard Office suite, even though it is not as feature-rich. There are fee-based and free versions available.

• Zoho Business is another ready solution, with a wider variety of applications that Google Apps.

• Simon and I recently covered the impending rollout of  Office Web Apps. While it isn’t available yet, the model it promises is ideal for a scenario like this, because it can offer users remote access to their important Microsoft Office files with a familiar interface.

Web office suites can help you keep your work accessible online, which is especially handy if all your workers don’t have remote access to your corporate network.

Social Media
Whether or not your organization has embraced social media behind the firewall, suddenly becoming a home-based organization means that employees are largely cut off from each other. Social networking tools can help them stay in touch with each other and the organization as a whole.

Some corporate-grade social media tools that might fit the bill include:

• Socialtext, a corporate social networking and collaboration tool that we’ve covered previously.
• Yammer, a Twitter clone, is another option for injecting social media into your organizational communications (see our previous coverage).

Each solution has fee-based and free versions.

Project Management

Putting your project management tools online is a prudent move, even before a crisis — but it could become a necessity in light of maintaining corporate operations in the midst of an H1N1 outbreak. However, Microsoft Project maintains its crown as the most popular — albeit mostly desktop-bound — corporate project management solution. Here are some good online project management tools:

• Basecamp is a the most well-known of all of the online PM tools  — we’ve written about it many times previously.
• Zoho Projects is an economical and innovative project management solution that Doriano previously covered for WWD.
• Charles reviewed Team Effect which garnered some mixed comments but is worthy a trial.
• PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) is another online project management option and according to Simon’s review it is definitely worth considering

Each of these solutions have fee-based and free versions.

Instant Messaging
Keeping your team in touch with each other even if they are all stuck at home is vital. If your organization isn’t already using instant messaging, then you need to consider it as part of your contingency plan.

Some instant messaging solutions you should consider include:

• Open source clients like Pidgin and Adium which let you encrypt chat sessions over commercial IM networks including AIM, GTalk, Windows Live, and Yahoo (s yhoo).
• Microsoft Office Communications Server also offers web-based access to its IM client. If your organization is running it, take steps to ensure your staff has access to it from home.

Web Conferencing & Collaboration
Today’s web conferencing and collaboration tools are ideal for keeping your team working together even though they’re not all working from the same office. Here are some options for web conferencing:

• Acrobat.com includes ConnectNow. Thursday covered Acrobat.com coming out of beta. It has free and fee-based versions and includes online collaboration features.
• Dimdim, which we’ve covered before, is an excellent low-cost teleconferencing tool
• Simon covered the beta launch of Team Apart, a free online collaboration tool that offers white board, video conferencing, and file sharing. Depending on the progress of the beta, it might be worth considering.

Crises and Web Working
Whether you are building out or just augmenting your communications infrastructure in light of the H1N1 threat, I recommend checking out these  applications now and not on the eve of a crisis. You should also make sure that employees know how to use these applications and how to access them well in advance of having to actually implement your crisis plan..

How is your organization preparing to continue operations during an H1N1 virus outbreak?

Image by mzacha from stock.xchng.

Well, it’s now official. Gmail is out of beta. Now, for you and me this probably means very little. I’ve been using the service for years and been very satisfied with it. This transition is more for large business, which Google hopes they will be able to hone in on now.

With this news hook, I thought I would talk about some of the advantage and a few tips and tricks that I use on Gmail to make it worthwhile for me. First, if you want a great mini-course on using Gmail, check out their page on becoming a Gmail ninja. I found it both good for a laugh and very informative. I won’t go over everything they have there, but there are a couple of things worth highlighting.

I really like the labels system. Many online e-mail services offer folder, and I really didn’t understand the difference between the two at first. Until one day, I had an e-mail that was related to both my job and bills I had to pay. Normally, I’d have to choose one folder or the other, but with labels, I can stick it in both and call it a day.

Another useful thing about Gmail is that it offers a more secure https: connection, if you are checking it on public wi-fi. While this may not be the end all of security when on a public Internet connection, it does help. You can access that on one-time basis at https://www.gmail.com or you can clicking on settings in the upper-right of Gmail, scrolling to the bottom of that page and clicking the radio button for “Always use https.”

There a lot of helpful settings in that area of the site, and if you are a heavy Gmail user, its worth some time to go through each page and make the settings are setup to make the most effective use of them.

One other tool to mention in the settings is the filters tab. I used to do a lot of eBay shopping, and would get a lot of e-mail from them. Mind you, I wanted this material, but it was clogging the front page of my inbox when I was looking for other material. The solution which worked for me was filters. This is very similar to Rules, if you use Microsoft’s Outlook. You set certain parameters, like who the e-mail is from, or e-mails that contain certain words and tell Gmail what to do with it. For this eBay problem, I simply had Gmail label them and archive them. This took them out of my inbox and put them in a place where I could look at them at my convenience.

This is a very powerful tool, and if your e-mail service is missing this, it might be worth considering a change.

The last thing I want to mention is Gmail Labs. These are add-ons to Gmail that are in testing. Some of them are a little crazy, like having to solve a few math problems before sending an e-mail late at night. (In order to prevent drunken e-mails) Some of them though seem really useful like tasks, which gives you a convenient to-do list in Gmail. These are in testing, so you definitely have to confident about your browsing experience before you go to far into the most experimental ones.

How about you? Do you like Gmail? Do you think its over-hyped? Are you worried about privacy issues?

Let me know in the comments.

Well, it’s now official. Gmail is out of beta. Now, for you and me this probably means very little. I’ve been using the service for years and been very satisfied with it. This transition is more for large business, which Google hopes they will be able to hone in on now.

With this news hook, I thought I would talk about some of the advantage and a few tips and tricks that I use on Gmail to make it worthwhile for me. First, if you want a great mini-course on using Gmail, check out their page on becoming a Gmail ninja. I found it both good for a laugh and very informative. I won’t go over everything they have there, but there are a couple of things worth highlighting.

I really like the labels system. Many online e-mail services offer folder, and I really didn’t understand the difference between the two at first. Until one day, I had an e-mail that was related to both my job and bills I had to pay. Normally, I’d have to choose one folder or the other, but with labels, I can stick it in both and call it a day.

Another useful thing about Gmail is that it offers a more secure https: connection, if you are checking it on public wi-fi. While this may not be the end all of security when on a public Internet connection, it does help. You can access that on one-time basis at https://www.gmail.com or you can clicking on settings in the upper-right of Gmail, scrolling to the bottom of that page and clicking the radio button for “Always use https.”

There a lot of helpful settings in that area of the site, and if you are a heavy Gmail user, its worth some time to go through each page and make the settings are setup to make the most effective use of them.

One other tool to mention in the settings is the filters tab. I used to do a lot of eBay shopping, and would get a lot of e-mail from them. Mind you, I wanted this material, but it was clogging the front page of my inbox when I was looking for other material. The solution which worked for me was filters. This is very similar to Rules, if you use Microsoft’s Outlook. You set certain parameters, like who the e-mail is from, or e-mails that contain certain words and tell Gmail what to do with it. For this eBay problem, I simply had Gmail label them and archive them. This took them out of my inbox and put them in a place where I could look at them at my convenience.

This is a very powerful tool, and if your e-mail service is missing this, it might be worth considering a change.

The last thing I want to mention is Gmail Labs. These are add-ons to Gmail that are in testing. Some of them are a little crazy, like having to solve a few math problems before sending an e-mail late at night. (In order to prevent drunken e-mails) Some of them though seem really useful like tasks, which gives you a convenient to-do list in Gmail. These are in testing, so you definitely have to confident about your browsing experience before you go to far into the most experimental ones.

How about you? Do you like Gmail? Do you think its over-hyped? Are you worried about privacy issues?

Let me know in the comments.

If you thought Micro$oft just sucked, then you are wrong. It sucks more and to the core.

Recently, Micro$oft adopted one of the cheapest tactics to drive hotmail users away GNU/Linux.

Hotmail users can only read their mails from a Linux Browser. They cannot compose mails nor reply to emails recieved when working on a Linux System.

Do you believe this? The best part of the whole story is, how many GNU/Linux users even care to use Hotmail?

OK, I just used firefox in Window$ to login to the hotmail account. I had two weird experiences.

Just as I logged in through my favorite browser Firefox, (Firefox 3.0.4, the lastest version till date) I was greeted by a message instructing me to upgrade my browser. I don’t understand how much more advanced a browser has to be, to display a simple hotmail inbox. God save Micro$oft.

Upgrade your browser?

Bingo! I had a new mail saying Bill Gates would come to Bangalore. The mail was sent by the M$ student partner to all my classmates, 50 of them. I thought of replying to all with a Thank you message and clicked on the Reply to all button.

Guess what happened! I got an error message:

Please remove some of your recipients. You can send your message to 10 people at a time.

How rude!

A M$ student partner can send en email to 50 recepients at a time while I can reply to only 10 people at a time? What kind of a f#$king logic is this? Why are not all people treated equally?

I request sincerely from the bottom of my heart, Please do not use Hotmail.

How many times again and again and again does Micro$oft proves its non-competency in the industry? This really has reached heights of monopoly and an unsatisfiable quench to conquer the world. In the process Micro$oft fails miserably and makes a fool of itself.

I take a “live” example to prove myself.

Having a mail server is a primary necessity for any educational institution. Since my college did not have one, the concerned personnel in collaboration with the Micro$oft Student Partner decided to use Micro$oft applications to provide email IDs to students and staff. This is surely a matter of pride for anybody in the institution to have the email – yourname@dr-ait.org.I appreciate the pain taken by these people to create email IDs for more than a thousand students and staff.

I don’t blame the college personnel for their ignorance to choose Micro$oft Live @edu. Micro$oft’s cheap mentality behind providing these services which they claim to be free(definitely not) is to be blamed.

All students were instructed to login into their mailbox at http://mail.live.com . I was stunned at what I saw. Anybody who wants to access his mailbox is forced to use Internet Explorer. The server will not respond if the user uses Mozilla Firefox. Holy shit, Isn’t this crap.

The error message I saw, left me speechless. Never before ever in my experience Mozilla Firefox had I seen this kind of an error message – “Redirect Loop”. Screenshot of the error is here.

You have to believe me at this point of time that I have enabled cookies.

The second note made me laugh my heart out -

Its likely to be a server configuration error and not on your computer.

Do not get fooled by the link in the address bar. Its redirected from http://mail.live.com. Its been a tradition of Micro$oft to make links look complicated just to show off.

Still don’t believe me? See this video. I am using Ubuntu Hardy Heron with Firefox 3.

Huh!

Finally, Opera could open the mailbox and what I saw made me say YUCK! If shit could shit, it would be Hotmail and its mailbox interface.Its so hard for anybody using GMail for more than four years where life is made easy, to just even compose a mail in Hotmail.

Micro$oft boasts that it provides these services for free? Ah-em. There are banner Ads and Flash based Ads in the mailbox. One in the header and another in the sidebar. I just sent a mail to my GMail ID to test the validity of Hotmail. Again, Micro$oft proved its Business mentality. Automatically Text Ads were added to the signature of the email sent through Hotmail. This is so very irritating.

My sincere advice to all institutions opting for a student-staff collaboration – Please Use Google Apps. Save students from the crucked, cunning world of Micro$oft.

I repeat, Micro$oft, you suck.

]]> http://geekpalace.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/feliz-cumpleanos-google/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:07:53 +0000 OzZrock http://geekpalace.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/feliz-cumpleanos-google/

Hoy la empresa de la G festeja su cumpleaños numero 10 ….

Felicidades por ellos, han hecho un trabajo maravilloso, que seria del internet sin sus busquedas tan acertadas.

Sus mapas de Google Maps, la hermosa bandeja de entrada del Gmail, Los Docs….

Mira la historia de Google aqui

Let’s face it: times are tough. This economic slowdown has seen giving slump more dramatically than in the past. The explanation is obvious…just drive by your local gas station, go pick-up groceries or look at the unsold homes in your neighborhood. Donors have less disposable income and are anxious about the future.

So, is there any good news? Actually, I think there is. The economy will recover—economies, like history, are cyclical by nature—and oil prices are already beginning to stabilize and drop from record highs. In addition, in recent days, we’ve seen a remarkable rise in the dollar’s value, making imports and goods, including food, more affordable. These are all positive signs.

Positive, macro-economic signs, however, do not change the amount of money in a donor’s wallet, at least not for a while. The reality is that we will see lower levels of giving at least into 2009 (remember, even when things get better, donors are cautious for a while) and maybe longer. There are no guarantees, and nonprofits doing their budgeting should not bank on year over year revenue increases.

Until things really turnaround, however, there are some creative and tangible things you can do to operate your organization more efficiently and effectively. Start by finding the most obvious place to cut costs without losing effectiveness or capabilities and if you follow the example of today’s most savvy companies and governments, that means focusing on IT costs.

Most IT spending today is incredibly inefficient. It relies on an outdated model of paying huge up front costs and ongoing license fees to lease software over which you have little to no control.

For example, how much do you pay Microsoft for desktop applications and back office applications (like Exchange)? The City of Washington, DC saved millions of dollars each year in licensing fees by switching to free (Google Aps) and Open Source (Open Office) solutions for their desktop applications. All of these are fully compatible with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft standards. How much could you save by doing the same? How many more lives could your nonprofit improve with the funds you’d save and have available for programs and services?

This is a large part of the reason that Orange Leap made its mature and full feature constituent relationship management (CRM) solution available as an open source offering earlier this year. You have all the functionality (and more) of a product like Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge®, but your cost of owning and operating the software will be 40-70 percent less. Plus, you don’t have to pay huge up front fees and you are not beholden to us. It’s open source. It is as flexible and customizable as you want it to be.

Hopefully, the silver lining to these difficult economic times is that nonprofits will find ways to creatively cut costs so they can focus more dollars on the people they serve. Software, including but not limited to CRM solutions, is a great place to start.

Ein nützlicher Link mit einem ersten Überblick, wie man seine bei google gespeicherten Datenzu sicher kann ist folgender: http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/back-up-your-google-apps-data-281635.php

Für Texte und Tabellen geht es wie folgt:

• Firefoxerweiterung Greasmonkey installieren: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/748
• Download-Script installieren http://1st-soft.net/gdd/

Tip: mit Down them all https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/201 geht der Download dann noch komfortabler.

There has been lots of hype since yesterday about the newly announced Google Sites being the death knell for Microsoft SharePoint… see headlines below:

• Google Goes After Another Microsoft Cash Cow
• Google Offers team Web Site Publishing Service
• Google Unveils Tools to Set Up Web Sites

Each of these articles tries to draw comparisons to Microsoft SharePoint and puts Google Sites forward as a valid contender. Complete Twoddle! I think this is total nonsense… Google Sites isn’t even in the same ball-park as SharePoint from a functionality perspective and I think the comparison is just a joke…

Google Sites only provides very simple web site creation… whereas SharePoint is a highly advanced web-based collaboration, portal, search, content management including MOD-compliant records management, business forms, business intelligence and application-hosting platform… the two pieces of software shouldn’t even be mentioned in the same sentence together!

SharePoint is huge and its usage has sky-rocketed over the last four years… it’s now the de facto standard for document management within the enterprise across virtually every industry sector… there’s no going back now… I’ll argue that Google Sites is simply too little too late within the enterprise space…

I’m not saying that Google Sites is bad… I actually think it’s a pretty good freebie for companies with really simple web-site and team-site needs… and I think it’s going to be hugely popular -  I just think the media hype about it bringing down SharePoint within enterprises is just silly…

The media would have us believe that Google, and their Google Aps suite is poised to shatter Microsoft’s dominance over corporate office and collaboration tools with a suite of disjointed online applications, the newest of which is Google Sites for creating business web sites and organisation team sites online, albeit free for base users, £25 approx per annum for corporate users who want extra features like storage space allowance and their own domain names etc.

Yes there is a huge business case for Google Apps… If I was starting a new company myself from scratch with no pre-existing infrastructure I’d be at Google’s front door with my cheque book with £25 per employee before I’d ever dream of trying to buy into Microsoft licenses for Active Directory, and Exchange and Office and SharePoint and all the rest of it…. and there are good examples of large corporate enterprise shifting in that direction, such as Proctor and Gamble for example!

Nevertheless I think the media underestimates the size of the battle ahead of Google in relation to trying to replace Microsoft Office within the enterprise.

First and foremost there is the will of average commercial Microsoft Office user… if you hadn’t noticed average user can’t be bothered with change that much… and they like the brand they know… like people who only buy Heinz beans… and Colgate toothpaste…

Second up, you’ve got all those ingrained system interfaces and Word/Excel report exports which companies have invested hugely in, all those Access databases interfacing onto back-office systems, all those highly customised word templates with the company logos embedded, all those Excel macros that grew up to be formalised business processes etc, etc. Office is everywhere within virtually every organisation. Sure Google Aps is as good as free, but the cost of trying to rip out Microsoft Office infrastructure for any sizeable company is just plain scary…

As well as this, I think it’s still going to be another couple of years before a lot of organisations really trust the likes of Google to host vast amounts of their corporate data…. especially when it’s not really clear where Google’s Service Level Agreements and Privacy Arrangements start and stop over your company’s data… I just don’t think they are an enterprise vendor yet….

The Software as a Service (SaaS) business strategy promises to take organisation infrastructure and processes to the next level of modularity, management and financial flexibility – but how well does it deliver on its promise today?  An enterprise that utilises only SaaS offerings for its IT&T systems is called an All SaaS Enterprise (ASE).  Can a company run purely on this model? 

At my company, NexGen, SaaS’s biggest Asia Pacific cheerleader, we have always endeavoured to ‘eat our own dog food’, and run an ASE. We succeed – almost.

As a start-up our requirements were clear.  We needed solutions that were quick to rollout, easily managed; offered flexible access, low upfront costs, and the ability to scale with our growth.  Software as a Service solutions offered each of these.  We deliberately went out to be as realistic as posible, building up our platform as if we were a normal non SaaS aligned start-up and based only on our internal requirements.  We did this to better understand the end customer and the industry.

The first step was finding suitable applications.  Part of our vision at NexGen is to evangelise Software as a Service in and for the Asia Pacific region so we are in a good position to know the offerings available but for someone outside of the industry it is still too much of an effort to find and test all the applications we required.  The SaaS community, including NexGen in the Asia Pacific region and the new channels that are emerging hope to improve this soon.  We utilised sources like Tanooma, SaaS Showplace, IBM’s SaaSpace and Neobinaries

We built our infrastructure carefully starting with the essentials, Office Productivity (MS Office), Networking (Linked In ), EmailSales Management (SalesForce), Document Management (Local storage), Telephony (desk Mobiles/Cells), Faxing (a fax machine), and basic website hosting (local web host).
Then in came the manual replacements – advanced Telephony (Alianza), advanced Banking (upgraded banking service), Fax Management (efax ); and more functionality advanced Document Management (Xythos On Demand), advanced web hosting, advanced Email and Calendaring (Hosted Exchange), Blog + Wiki (Hosted SharePoint) and Web Meetings (GoToMeeting ).
Finally we implemented Systems Management (TriActive ), Email Marketing (iContact), collaborative office productivity (Google Apps & Buzzword – see my article SaaS in the Office ), and mind mapping (bubbl.us).
Still to come are Business Intelligence (Enovation – see SaaS Business Intelligence), Billing (Aria ), advanced Business Networking (Xeequa ), and a Knowledge Base (Hosted SharePoint).  To give a simple user experience all applications are brought together in our Intranet (Hosted SharePoint). (local web host),

Is Internet access a problem? No, there is MORE access than the in-office alternative. I have access to our SaaS platform in our offices, as well as hotels, airports, and cafes, and I don’t require a VPN nor suffer from the slower access you normally experience with one.  It will get even easier with the rollout of services like WiMAX in Asia and the Pacific .

 What about support?  Believe it or not but we have LESS user incidents on our All SaaS platform than on an equivalent internal platform, due mainly to the focus on usable user interfaces and on applications doing one thing and doing it well.  Of the incidents we have had, most of the problems have been able to be solved very simply by either internal technical team members or even by the user themselves, mainly because of a high availability and relevance of self support options such as FAQ’s, training video’s, online manuals and built in hints and tips.  The main area of inconvenience has been in the few incidents that have required support by the vendor.  Though we have found SaaS support to be generally of a high standard, multiple vendors mean multiple support teams rather than one internal IT team, absence of advice in the context of our company, and a slower pace to action.   This suggests that there is space in the SaaS Ecosystem for outsourcers, MSP’s and aggregators to pull together multiple offerings and provide company contextual support and advice.

Is there a SaaS solution for everything?  We found suitable solutions for everything except Accounting and offline office productivity .  Being based in Singapore brings many advantages but it also brings specific accounting rules and a small market that has not yet been reached by a product focussed at small businesses – hopefully soon.
Also desktop based Office Productivity and email/calendaring are required when offline, however the offline web via Firefox 3, Adobe AIR, and Google gears will soon fill this gap (refer to my article “SaaS in the Office – Web based Office Productivity ”)

What is the overall experience? We have been running most of our All SaaS platform for the better part of a year and our experience has been almost unanimously good.  Of most importance to our business is that we have more functions available more often, and kept to a higher standard of availability than if we had in-sourced our infrastructure.  Our COO is effectively our entire IT department, but we still have hundreds of on-call systems experts to help us.  And most importantly of all, process implementation and change is more business driven, not technology driven.  See a full list of benefits in the accompanying All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) – the Applications and Analysis article.

 What would I do differently next time?  We are very happy with our infrastructure but if ‘next time’ the Web based Office Productivity area is solved, and there are Software as a Service Aggregators who can provide support in the context of our company, then we would take advantage of these.

See a full list of the SaaS offerings, benefits, hassles, worries see the accompanying All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) – the Applications and Analysis.

* I also post versions of relevant AsiaPacific articles from this this blog on the SaaS Asia Pacific Community site.

At my company NexGen , we routinely evaluate and analyse SaaS solutions and we have been ruining an All SaaS Enterprise (ASE) for the better part of the last year (see the All SaaS Enterprise Business Case sibling article ).  How well do the solutions fare?  What are the benefits? What are the hassles?  What is the jury still out on?

SaaS offerings 

We chose applications based on our requirements, not SaaS ideology.  The decisions we made are by category of application are :

Accounting – QuickBooks

Try as we might we have not yet found a suitable SaaS accounting solution that suits our company – a Singapore based start-up with a QuickBooks experienced accounting team – Quickbooks have a SaaS application but it is only availabale for the US.  There are many good solutions out there, including some Asia Pacific SaaS solutions (SaaSu , Xero , and myworkspace), just none right for our situation.

Banking – CitiBank

Our executive team uses our banks SaaS account management application which utilises a dongle to create, approve and enquire on transactions amongst other things.  One of the best examples of SaaS, it is easy to use and enormously valuable in that it enables even the most mobile executive to keep financial control all over the world at any time of the day.

Billing – Aria
Aria provides full customer billing lifecycle management.

Blog – WordPress , and managed Sharepoint
Both offerings provide a good quality blog as part of wider function sets.

Business Performance management / Business Intelligence – Enovation
Enovation provides an excellent easy to use and quick to value SaaS BPM offering.

Document Management – Xythos On Demand, Local storage, and Local Backup
Xythos provides a full document management solution, including online storage and access control, version control etc.  We utilise the solution only to half of its full extent but it still one of the most valuable for our very mobile organisation.  It ha a web absed file amanger interface but also require a local client for synchronisation of files onto a PC.

Email and Calendaring – Hosted Microsoft Exchange
We looked at Zimbra, Google apps and other solutions but a Hosted Exchange solution won for three reasons – it had the breadth of functionality we required, our users were comfortable and experienced in using it, and we could not find suitable Zimbra hosters in region.  This is an area we will continue to review as there are many exciting things happening here.

Email Marketing – iContact
Email marketing is an important function for us to keep in touch with our networks.  iContact does the job cleanly and well with an easy to use interface. We also looked at ConstantContact which was also a good quality product.

Fax Management - efax & physical fax machines
Despite the prevalence of email, faxes are still an important communication method.  With a mobile workforce a single location specific solution was not tenable for quick communication.  E-Fax allows us to receive and send faxes as if we were in the office when we are anywhere in the world.  We still have physical fax  machines but these are rarely used.

Intranet – Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Sharepoint is not without its issues but it is still a good intranet solution.  The hosted model and it’s availability in combination with hosted exchange made this the best intranet choice for our business.

Mind Mapping – bubbl.us
Mind Mapping is an excellent tool – I encourage everyone to add it to their office communications practices.  It is not as fully featured as some of its on computer rivals but it is good enough and makes sharing and collaborating on mind maps extremely easy.

Networking - Xeequa & Linked-in
Networking is an essential function for a SaaS hub like NexGen.  Linked-In is a staple personal networking and relationship management solution.  Xeequa is for both individuals and their companies.  It adds company to company relationships and some advanced ways to interact.

Office Productivity – MS Office (locally installed), Google Apps , Wiki, Buzzword
Unfortunately I can’t say we are all SaaS here.  We use a mixture of solutions to match the requirement of the situation.  For one internal project we use only Google Apps, we communicate collaborative group information via a wiki, and we use Buzzword where it makes sense, but the main product of use is MS office.  This is mainly because this way of working is accepted by our staff and always accessible.  There are however many areas in Office productivity that SaaS can improve on – see my SaaS Office Productivity article for my thoughts here.

Sales Management – SalesForce
Being a SaaS hub keeping track of our relationships and opportunities is core to our business so this was one of the most important pieces of our infrastructure solution.  We also looked at entellium and hosted Suger CRM.

Systems Management – TriActive
A mobile workforce means, until our SaaS infrastructure is completely clientless, mobile computers and the requirement to manage them.  With some Systems Management experience of my own I really appreciate the value a SaaS model brings to this area.  Systems Management was formally a heavy lifting area with full time staff needed to install and maintain a local system.  With TriActive you get all the functionality you need with none of this hassle.

Unified Communications / Telephony – Alianza
Our team is very mobile in both the Asia Pacific region and in the U.S. which can mean expensive phone bills.  It also means that they could be hard to get hold of.  When I first heard of VoIP as a SaaS product it took me a while to appreciate that business telephony does not have to be a special case and can be viewed as another business system like the rest of our platform.  Amongst many other benefits, our SaaS based VoIP and IP-PBX solution from Alianza means that we have the same number wherever we are via either deskphone or softphone, and that our team can all change their call forwarding via an easy web interface

Web Meetings – GoToMeeting
Web meetings save us an enormous amount of time and money and can also be our partners preference in many situations.  This is an essential piece of infrastructure and GoToMeeting is the one we rate to be the most intuitive solution by a good margin.

Website – Externally Hosted
This is a no brainer but it is important to note that it is still SaaS in a broad sense, and one of the earliest forms.  You could host your website internally if you wanted to but unless there are some big reasons to do that why would you?

Wiki – Xythos , Hosted Microsoft SharePoint
Both offerings provide a good quality blog as part of wider function sets.

Benefits, Hassles and still to be decided

From our experience we have been able to compile a list of benefits of our All SaaS platform, they are :

• Interface is business focussed, not geek focussed – easy setup
• Up and running straight away
• Supports and enables an independent workforce
• Lower costs
• Less hassle
• Less downtime
• More uptime – best quality backups for quicker recovery (we have not lost one byte of data yet)
• More access (when in the office, travelling with laptop and using a foreign device)
• Running better apps than we could by ourselves (some examples are systems management, business intelligence, location independent VoIP, billing)
• Enormous upfront cost reduction
• Change is a business decision, not a technology decision
• No sleepless nights worrying about backup and stability
• New features with no upgrade pain
• Consistent cost – our systems are listed under business infrastructure on our P&L
• We know the cost of doing business every month right in front of me
• Single access point for all applications in security enabled internet accessible intranet
• Also gives independent end users control – SaaS apps are generally accessible and usable
• No application conflict worries

We also have been able to put together a list of hassles

• Dealing with many different vendors rather than one it team
• Support
  • Though mostly good, is unable to advise in the context of our company
  • For one product in particular remote support has been an issue, as opposed to having internal it dept.  For other apps it has been fine to have email alone.
  • Support is slower Finding suitable SaaS solutions for our business

And what else should be considered for your organisation :

• Internal technical resources bring product knowledge with them
• Options to suit all organisation types (i.e. we couldn’t get an adequate accounting package for a Singapore small business)
• SaaS doesn’t solve everything – solution introduction still requires co-ordination, but for user experience, not installation
• The effect of other support & training Mechanisms – On line scalable customer care – FAQ’s, Discussion boards, online support desk, pre recorded video’s, built-in helpdesks.
• How does the offering facilitate switching providers?
• Am I choosing the best product?

Are any services are deviceclient dependent?

Two applications (Offline Office Productivity, and Accounting) require local installs. Six applications require a local client installed on the users device for full functionality.  Only one is very specific device dependant (Unified Communications).

 The options available to run an All SaaS Enterprise are both varied and rich but there are some small holes in our ability to find the right business software solutions for every requirement.  There is a long list of benefits that far outweigh the hassles.  Though there are still some questions to be answered the SaaS industry is hard at work on them.  Best of all we have found both an excellent solution for our business, and all the better that it is SaaS.

Also have a look at another companies All SaaS Enterprise enterprise experience.

* I also post versions of relevant AsiaPacific articles from this this blog on the SaaS Asia Pacific Community site.