Foldera Update

Just for the record, it wasn’t an accusation, it was a question; this is in response to a comment posted about my Foldera ‘Vaporware’ post. The guys at Foldera assure us they are working on it, so we’ll wait and see. In the meantime:

1)  The stockholders shouldn’t be getting their updates on company progress from my blog - although I appreciate the traffic - they should be getting it from the Foldera Blog but there hasn’t been a new post there in almost two months. 

2)  I’m still waiting for my beta account.

Add Email to Your 5 User Web Office Account for Just 33% More in Fees per Month!

WebEx has a email service available. The press release is here but I think requires a couple clarfications: 

“WebEx WebOffice with email requires no additional hardware or software and is the only on-demand collaboration solution built for the way small businesses work.”

The “…only on-demand collaboration solution…”? What rock are these people living under. How about ‘WebEx has finally joined the rest of the on-demand collaboration solutions by offering email…’. Sure, sure it begs the question what does Collaboration mean but we’re not going to solve that one today, regardless of how you define it even now, there are at least two providers you can put in almost any [reasonable] definition of Collaboration.

The pricing states:

“WebEx Mail is $5.95 per mailbox, per month with discounts available for large deployments. To celebrate today’s general availability announcement, WebEx is offering a special introductory price of just $3.95 a month for a limited time. “

Which is true only after you have purchased the standard WebOffice at a minimum of $59.95 per month, so it’s really $59.95 per month PLUS $3.95 per person for email. Gee for my 5 user workgroup just a 33% increase in monthly fees to add email….

Will the real Zimbra user count please stand up?

I’m with Pat on this one. 2MM new users in 3 months? That’s 22M new users a day, including weekends. Please….

Online Office Suite Review and Comparison

Computerworld has a recent review of online office suites, Ajax13, Google, Thinkfree and Zoho. It’s a good article. If your considering using an online office suite for your business it’s worth a read.

For those of you who are watching the online office suite marketplace, it also notes that Google and ThinkFree may be in negotiations. Do you think it will happen?

OOXML, does it matter?

Wired News had an interesting article on OOXML. Generally, I try to stay out of these pationate debates on standards but the article, here, highlights how Microsoft is already impacting the SaaS document providers. Can you help put this in perspective for end users, why is this important, or is it?

Why ‘Free-mail’ Has a Bad Reputation

Hey everyone, sorry about the little hiatus, I was on vacation (still am) and despite best intentions did not spend any time posting over the last week or so. I suppose that’s a good thing.

I do now want to write about an article on the Washington Post site regarding Web-mail. The gist of the article is that Google is the best of the ‘Free-mail’ options compared to Yahoo and Hotmail. The article ends with three points:

“But what if you plan to employ a Web-mail account as your primary e-mail address? That can be a complicated value judgment. Gmail’s ads are generally in good taste, but do you want every bit of personal correspondence to arrive with its own marketing payload?”

Is Google forgoing potential business customers by continuing to display ads in the email client? Could they possibly be making money with these ads? Until just now, when I went to look specifically, I had never even looked at the ads. I knew they were they but never looked at them and never even considered looking at them. I’m there do get things done, read my mail, respond, are these ads really adding revenue at the expense of users?

“There’s also the nagging issue of Gmail’s developers not considering the service “done” after 33 months of effort — thought it may be comforting to learn that Google employees themselves use Gmail.”

Can we stop exploiting the word ‘Beta’ now? Look 33 months, millions of people use it every day and anyone can get access and use it, it’s not in Beta anymore. Beta use to be cool, now it’s just a gimmick. Google’s not the only one diluting the definition of Beta, of course. Now we are going to have to have different levels of Beta, ‘Limited Beta’ (which means it really is in Beta and not just anyone can use it), ‘Beta’ (the company is trying to be cool), ‘Perpetual Beta’ (the company has no idea how to monetize the product and needs to keep the investors on the line).

And finally, here’s the one I don’t understand: 

“But the real sticking point may be whether you want to trust your most important messages to any free service at all.”

I don’t know what this means. Why wouldn’t I want to trust my messages to a free service? What is the opposite of a ‘free service’ and why should I ‘trust’ them?

More Products or Better Products

Perhaps your app can’t be everything for everybody. But in the office suite space can you focus on just one piece. EditGrid recently had a post along these lines. I haven’t used EditGrid yet. Have you? Is it significantly better that the competitors it lists? Has its’ specialization resulted in a best in class product? I think Ajax13 should be also listed as a competitor.

What about other applications? You’ve used the tools. Do you think the companies we talk about here should be focusing on extending their product product sets or improving the quality and features of the products they already have?

SaaS Search Terms

Thought it might be interesting to post the search terms that brought users to SaaS-a-fras in the last week. Perhaps obvious to some of you but I like to use this information to see who is comparing which products. Little competitive research anyone…..

zimbra tasks 2007
Zoho BlueTie Foldera Zimbra
foldera stock
saas
radicati intermedia
zoho security
webmail.us everyone.net comparison
zoho vs thinkfree
foldera beta invite
sherweb
foldera evaluation
usa.net 2007 email entries
zoho
poll saas
zimbra without email
project management tools
webmail.us not receiving emails 
Mi8 webmail
sherweb
wrike zoho
wrike
foldera 2007 
mailsnare
hosted saas enterprise trends 2007 ppt 
webmail.us zimbra 
mi8
saas powerpoint
zimbra and basecamp
Foldera 2007
outlook alternative 
saas trend 
projity 
bluetie vs 
google apps for enterprise 
document zoho google docs 
predictions for saas 2007 
zoho google docs comparison 
ajax13 web worker daily 
google docs and spreadsheets+document co 
zoho google
zoho security

SaaS Trend Poll

I wanted to post a follow up to the SaaS Trend Poll posting from a few days ago. I had double http’s in the link, I’m sure some you figured it out and fixed it. Have you voted yet? Want to share what you voted for? I voted SaaS on the desktop, How about you?

Web-Based Project Management Tools Experience

We did a little searching around today for web-based project management. The first results in Google were sponsored links for TeamWorkZone.com, eProject.com and AutoTask.com. These might be great tools but I didn’t spend any time looking at them because I couldn’t find any pricing on the web sites and no demo was available without filling out a form. So I couldn’t tell if they had such great tools I would be willing to be contacted by someone to give me a demo. That and the combination that there was no pricing led me to believe they would be expensive.

So I went back to the core. I signed up for a free trial of BaseCamp and Zoho Project. Basecamp was eliminated because I couldn’t put dates on the To-Do items. I know you can put them on Milestones but not everything that needs to be done in a week is a ‘milestone’.

Now Zoho compared to Central Desktop. Zoho has a more visually appearing interface. We also liked the reports. The pricing is good. The thing that kept us from converting today? The inability to add comments to a task. There’s no way for staff or update or reassign a task and add a comment related to the change. This is possible in Central Desktop. Also like the way task lists are available via links on the left navigation in Central Desktop. It would be nice to be able to see this in Zoho.

One thing that definately needs to be fixed in Central Desktop is that if you have a long list of task and you scroll down the page and edit one, the date selection overlay appears at the top of the page, not where you are on the page. Apart from that, I think I owe Central Desktop an apology. The product actually includes a well rounded set of elements for task management. However, I would switch to Zoho if I could add comments to tasks. Primarily for the reports and the way milestones can have a date range, it’s very helpful for building a tactics gantt chart rather than just a task gantt chart.

 So there you have it, focus group of one.