I recently sat down with the folks at VisibleGains and other members of our technology team to talk about our thoughts on structured team collaboration, as well as search and our partner Attivio. Mush Hakhinian also gives an interesting talk about security with two-factor authentication and our partner RSA, while Charlie Weiblen discusses performance enhancement and our partner Akamai.

Please click on the video below to watch.

I was recently reading a Gartner report on market trends in Team and Social Software by Tom Eid and Bianca Francesca Granetto. (The full June 2009 report, called "Market Trends: Web Conferencing, Teaming and Social Software," is available for purchase from Gartner.) The report is very insightful in pointing out "the convergence in technologies and usage across unified communications, Web 2.0, team collaboration and web conferencing."

Service’s gold standard
The gold standard for service availability in the olden days was the “dial tone.” You could pick up the phone and you always knew that familiar tone would be there to greet you. Managing mission-critical software services needs a similar gold standard. With clients utilizing SaaS for critical information exchange across multiple processes and time zones, the expectation is for SaaS platforms to always be available and always performing. Even scheduled downtime for upgrades can be troublesome for business-critical activities.

This standard for platform availability is indeed very much out of the reach of most commercial SaaS platforms today. Some of the challenges are due to lack of rigor in software design and testing, while others have to do with lack of operational environments which are meant for high-availability services.

What is high availability and how do we measure it?
Before we delve into how to plan service management for highly available SaaS platforms, it is important to understand how to best measure availability. We also need to set the expectations for various platform components to deliver high availability service.

I am often asked how to put together the business case for Software as a Service (SaaS) and if the traditional Return on Investment (ROI) metrics is the correct way to look at SaaS offerings. The question is very relevant as organizations affected by the economy now must leverage the reduced human and capital resources at their disposal.

Interestingly, to answer the question of a SaaS solution's ROI we must first calculate the value of enterprise software and hardware investments, which is called the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Information Rights Management (IRM), also known as enterprise digital rights management, has always been the elusive silver bullet for IT organizations trying to protect intellectual property inside and outside the firewall.

By applying both encryption and permissioning capabilities to corporate information, IRM provides the core requirements to protect access to information. First, encryption capabilities ensure that no one is able to access information they are not authorized to see. Second, permissioning capabilities ensure that access authority can be defined based on an individual's role and need to access (view, print, edit etc.) the information.