SaaS, Offline SaaS, S+S does it offers what we need..?
I wanted to post this blog for a while now, as a follow up for the previous one about S+S and SaaS. Actually I was thinking about skipping it, just because it got too long and I did wrote it as an exercise for some other work. Anyway, with the release / announcement of Live Mesh the topic is news everywhere so I decided to post it anyway… happy reading, it’s really long ;-)
Cloud Level.
Everybody works together in a seamless collaborative way and is able to work from every place in the world, unleashing the creativity and innovation of the individual and the crowd [Collective Intelligence], all this enabled by Cloud Computing, S+S, SaaS, Web2.0 and SOA technologies.
[ Picture taken last week on the way to Livigno, I had to stop to take this one 
]
Back to the Ground Level…
What kind of capabilities do products need to support enterprises with this ambition?
I want to work anytime anywhere and on anything. So, I need access to the sources which I need to do my job, the right information, great tools and the workflow I have to follow must be available. The main question is: "what kind of work do I have to do...". The answer to this question would give a direction to the capabilities I need from these tools and platforms and with that I can decide if SaaS, offline SaaS or Software plus Services would fit my needs.
Writer.
For example, I'm a writer, working on a book. [to start small] I can use every kind of tool which gives me the ability to type my prose [Notepad, Office Words, Google Docs, Zoho writer, Live Writer, WordPerfect, WordPad...] and save it to any location where I can access it. Web-, local-, mobile- or home-storage doesn't matter [ Hard drive, USB, Cell Phone, Intranet, SkyDrive, Sharepoint, Google Sites, Office Online, etc... ]. The most important thing, I must be able to access it wherever I am and I must be able to type my prose anytime, anywhere.
Two capabilities I need as a single writer are:
Beside this I need some kind of input device which supports these capabilities. This can be a typewriter [it offers also typing support and accessible storage]. But we live in a digital world, so this would probably be a personal computer or when I'm on the road a laptop, a Ultra-Mobile PC, a Smart-Phone or when I don't own a device I can use public devices [ not that realistic, I don't think I would start working when I don't own an input device ].
Anyway, to give me the ability to work everywhere the two capabilities "typing support" and "accessible storage" should be device independent. When I'm home I use my PC, when I'm traveling I can use my laptop and when I'm visiting friends I can use their device...
Another capability I need from the tools as a "type anytime-anywhere" writer:
It's not reasonable to write a book on a cell phone. Although, sometimes I think my wife does it when text-messaging friends.
We have to downgrade this "device independent" requirement. Something like... the device shouldn't be more than 75% less productive then working on a Personal Computer [ 100% ]. For example, working on laptops is a little bit more difficult than PC's, the keyboard and mouse are less easy to handle and the screen is smaller. So laptops are at 95%. Cell phones are at 5% of the productivity rate, although Millennials, are text messaging on small phones typing 500 words a minute with their thumbs [ Amplify the Impact of Your People with Enterprise 2.0 Technologies ]. Smart phone a little bit higher 15% and UMPC's are around 75%.
So the capability that it must run on any device should be :
- device independent, till 75% productivity lost
For laptops and any other mobile device, another important "productivity" factor is the environment you are working. You're mobile so you can work everywhere and not every environment is that productive. [ This is your Anti-Productivity Pod by Coding Horror].
There are situations that you only want to read on those 75% less productivity devices, but that's not the writer-scenario we are talking about.
So far, so good... SaaS with Offline capabilities like Google Docs with Google Gears would fit in this stand-alone writer scenario and Live Mesh [S+S] would fit also.
Publisher, the collaboration starts...
The book continues and I found a publisher who wants to publish my book.
The publisher needs my document or documents to print it, review it and edit it for publishing. So it has to be in a format his tools understand or should be able to convert it. Beside this common format, I don't want the publisher to edit my book before it's ready for review.
So, we got one extra need for the storage and one for the way it's stored:
- Permission levels on the storage
- stored in a common format
The way the publisher gets access to the documents is a bit more complex. In the pre-digital century, writers would bring the whole book in paper format to the publisher or would send it by courier, both where time consuming and in the current information age the content would probably be outdated at the moment it arrives.
Sending a mobile-storage [ USB, CD, External Hard-Drive] by DHL's same Day delivery service is faster but gives constrains to the "anywhere" rule of my typing experience, I need to be in a place where a DHL employee can pick up my package and it still would cost a day to deliver my book to the publisher. not good for reviewing and editing where we probably send the documents serval times.
Storage capability:
I could send the files by email or during an instant messaging session [near real-time]. But both systems aren't designed for sending huge amount of data and more important those systems aren't designed for the reviewing and editing process a book needs.
A piece of the communication decision tree made by Dave Pollard.
We're not asking a straightforward question, we want review and editing. Probably several times the book is reviewed and edited by me and the publisher.
When using email for this kind of processes "sending different versions of the same data to different people who can change that data" will end up in phone calls, conference calls and arguing about who has got the most recent version and if all the changes the other made are in that version. It will end in a drama, a great topic for a "Stephen King"-thriller.
Bizarre tales of dark doing and unthinkable acts from the twilight regions where horror and madness take on errie, unearthly forms…
| Some other interesting papers according to email and what kind of tasks it's designed and used for: Email is one of the most successful computer applications yet devised. Our empirical data show however, that although email was originally designed as a communications application, it is now being used for additional functions, that it was not designed for, such as task management and personal archiving . We call this email overload. We demonstrate that email overload creates problems for personal information management: users often have cluttered inboxes containing hundreds of messages, including outstanding tasks, partially read documents and conversational threads. Furthermore, user attempts to rationalise their inboxes by filing are often unsuccessful, with the consequence that important messages get overlooked, or "lost" in archives. |
Anyway, what kind of capabilities does this kind of review, editing collaboration needs? First of all the communication should be possible in an asynchronous way, I'm not going to read and discus by phone or in person every sentences.
Communication capability:
- Asynchronous communication.
The storage of the documents must have version control or the tool itself must have an embedded version control. Tracking changes made by participants and revert a document to a previous revision is an important need for collaboration systems which are used for reviewing and editing of the same data. Changes made by others can conflict with my book idea and I want to see what changes other have made.
Also I and the publisher want to keep up to date about changes the other made. With email you get a notification with the document attached, the storage should also need to send notifications when changes are made.
Communication capability:
Beside these requirements I still need the ability to work disconnected from the storage I share. So, there are two kinds of storage's the one I share and use when I'm connected and the one I use locally when I'm not able or don't want to use the shared storage.
Working with different storage's with different people on the same data gives some challenges according to synchronization. What happens when two participants are working offline at the same document? Or what happens when I'm uploading an old version of a document?
The everlasting question “Do I currently work with the most up-to-date data..?” The publisher wants to know this because he doesn’t want to review deprecated chapters and I want to know if he already reviewed a scene where I want to change something. This is a challenging problem from a technologic point of view and can only be solved with arrangements according to the state of documents. For example I finished a chapter and sets its state to “ready for review” the publisher gets an notification and reviews that chapter and sets it’s state to “reviewed”.
Storage capability:
- Synchronization.
- Locking.
- Process Flow, documents should have a state
We can go on with these capabilities for a while, but I think we got the most important ones. Let’s focus on some other things.
Writing-Tool Support.
I didn’t focus on writing tool support and the features such a tooling needs. In my opinion it’s a personal choice, a personal flavor what works best for you. I often use notepad at the start of an article and switch to Live Writer when I’m almost finished. Other people use Words for it… so the features the word-processing tools got aren’t that important for this scenario.
Actually one feature every word-processing tool needs to support, beside typing support, is the ability to copy and paste data from within the tool and from outside the tool. I search for information and save it, I type some notes at different locations. I don't want to recreate those.
Writing tool capability:
With the tool use we also should make a distinction with a productivity index just like we did with the devices. But I can’t think of a tool which would be the 100% reference tool. So, we forget that one.
Capability Need vs. Concept Implementation.
Let’s take a look at the different implementations of the concepts [S+S, SaaS, Offline SaaS] and the capabilities I need as a writer together with the collaboration with my publisher.
I made this table with some notes in it... I think there are a lot of discussion points and I had to guess some features for Live mesh because I'm not invited to use it.
Conclusion
I just used a very simple scenario [business pattern] to discuss the basic capabilities I and my publisher need to do our work. It would get more and more interesting when we would start looking at custom enterprise applications, mashups with bigger and richer collaboration needs… but let’s keep it with this list for now.
Actually, we can make the conclusion that not one of the “currently implemented” concepts [SaaS, Offline SaaS and S+S] for wordprocessing and a little bit of collaboration offers all the features we need. Sharepoint is the best, with Groove attached to it, it even offers synchronization. But we can discus if that is an S+S solution [I don’t think so].
Anyway, with the typewriter and paper we only could mark the first two capabilities green [typing support and accessible storage]. So we’re making progress…
Software plus Services [S+S] vs Software as a Services [SaaS] "The Battle"
Just finished creating a SharePoint site for some international collaboration work and meanwhile Google launches Google Sites.
Not that I'm thinking to switch to Google sites. But it's getting more and more interesting what's happening in the Cloud. On one hand we've got S+S, some services in the cloud and some services on-premise, and on the other hand you got SaaS, everything in the cloud.
Not that exciting. Although, when you start reading all the comments people make why they want to use on thing over the other, it's getting interesting.
For example a post from Phil Wainewright called Microsoft’s software-plus-Yahoo! play where he uses the old "Microsoft buys everything" ideas around services.
A short summery of his post: Yahoo is 2.0 Microsoft isn't, so they want buy 2.0.
Pretty boring argument, but it triggered Gianpaolo to give a reaction in his blog with a post called "S+S: Real or have I drunk too much Kool-Aid? :)". The example he uses to persuade the reader that S+S is real, Office with Office Live, isn't that exciting... but, it's a nice discussion.
Some statements from both posts:
Gianpaolo:
- Office is far superior to any web based productivity tools.
- The problem with Office was collaboration and anywhere access
- Having the back end as a hosted solution is very good.
- No hassles in term of installation, data backup etc.
But as far as user interaction is concern, I am a big believer in bringing it as close to the user as possible.
Why would I ever want the cloud between me and my work?
I believe in S+S because when done properly it is far superior to a 'cloud-only' SaaS model.
So, Gianpaolo's reason to take S+S over SaaS is productivity although he also recognizes the pros behind a hosted solution in terms of installation and backup's
Phil Wainewright:
- They’re still going to have to buy software
- Now that the Web exists, the easiest way to get those services is to click a link and let someone else run the software
- ‘Lots more software, but we’ll take care of it for you.’
Phil, mentioned the pros behind hosted solutions and the money it costs to buy Office.
This posting and counter posting continuous with two more post where Phil mentions the offline web, Adobe AIR and Google Gears, for bringing the cloud to your laptop... to get offline capabilities with SaaS. Gianpaolo uses a more interesting example then the Office example in this post.
There are plenty of others, specially in the enterprise where data ownership, regulatory compliance etc. are big decision factors.
So, we've got a start for some kind of a list.
| Software plus Services | Software as a Service |
| Productivity | Installation |
| Usability | Data Backup |
| Data Ownership | Shared Working |
| Regulatory Compliance | |
| some other enterprise concerns... | |
| | |
Let's continue, with the Sites.Google blogposts this week and all their comments.
First an impressive article "Why Google Apps Could Lose the Enterprise Market" [to long to call it a blogpost] by Sarah Perez.
The article continues where Gianpaolo stopped mentioning reasons for the enterprise.
A pro for SaaS [ Sites.Google == SaaS ] workers can set up a site 'without having to burden IT for support'. The main idea behind this; end-users can use what ever kind of tool they like out-of-the-Cloud to do there work. No more contact with the IT department, no more maintenance, etc pretty interesting but there are some drawbacks. Shara mentions five: Functionality, Security, Terms of Service, ROI, Shrugs Shoulders.
Functionality, actually the same as usability and productivity.
Security,
Although users may see IT as gatekeepers preventing them from being able to do their jobs, turning that control over to Google instead may not be a better solution.
Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations
It would be comforting to have an SLA that covered the entire suite
Terms of Service, this is interesting reading, I didn't know it but in the Google TOS has this:
Sentecne This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services
ROI, I don't understand the argumentation around this topic in the article.
Shrugs Shoulders, this is a nice example what can happen when you give control away, you have to pay to get it back.
So they only way to control employee access is to sign up for the program? If that wasn't such genius, I might actually call it...well, evil.
Anyway, lets look at the comments...
Blah. And just when companies are starting to get used to their employees having blogs, we now have this new battle to fight.
The way I see it, if IT departments were doing their jobs (and some are) there would be no need to be having this discussion.
Reminds me of the PC vs. Mainframe arguments in the early eighties. It will be interesting to re-visit this issue in 20 years.
Because just as data is important to Google, it is also important to those companies. Not all innovative uses of information technology goes on in Silicon Valley, businesses are implementing more advanced distributed applications and architectures in order to have the data where it is needed when it is needed
Solve that nagging problem of control, create some sort of hosting service that could be configured and monitored by corporate IT professionals
Any time you upgrade to a newer version you need to build again most of the old intranet sites.
Enhough quoting...
let's add some points to the table
| Software plus Services | Software as a Service |
| Productivity | Installation |
| Usability | Data Backup |
| Data Ownership | Shared Working |
| Regulatory Compliance | Self Servicing End-Users |
| some other enterprise concerns... | No Upgrading Issues |
| In Control | |
| Existing Architectures | |
| SLA | |
One thing I'm missing is the online-offline capabilities of S+S, or can you count that under Productivity and Usability. I use Sharepoint allot, but always even on the Wiki pages, I attach a Groove workspace to it, just to keep on working while I'm offline. When I'm on a plane I can keep on working, next week I'm on vacation and not sure the hotel has Internet access [Yeah I work during vacations] So, offline capabilities are very important for me.
I think that also counts for people working at the office, there are enough examples of services which stopped working [Microsoft Windows Live Services Suffer Global Outage, Salesforce.com crashes again, Thread: Massive (500) Internal Server Error.outage started 35 minutes ago] and when you depend on them as an enterprise it will cost a lot of money. At that moment the difference between working offline with outdated data and not working at all is a big difference between S+S and SaaS.
In conjunction with that, the SLA. The SLA story behind SaaS applications is a bit tricky. Who do you give control over your business and your business data? someone you trust! to bad, trust isn't business vocabulary. I never heard a customer saying to me "I trust on your bleu eyes that you will finish that project in time in budget". So, there are different kind of agreements. Amazon pays money when they don't fulfill the SLA they offer and Salesforce.com tries to get trusted by the customer to show them there uptime. Sounds al great, but they don't take in to account something like a cable break [Mediterranean Cable Break].
So, trust and SLA's are nice to have offline capabilities are a must have..!
[ this journey will continue, the post is getting bigger and bigger and no ended yet... so, I will proceed after my vacation. Probably during my vacation, I got offline capability with Live Writer for postings ]
The other posts and comments I planned to use:
Google Sites: What's all the fuss? <-- got a great comment: "where can I download Google sites"
It Took 16 Months, But Google Relaunches Jotspot <-- interesting thing about Services out of the Cloud, what happens when a Service Providers is bought by an other company. It happens ;-)