Category: Internet

Mar 04 2008

Microsoft gets SaaS-y(ish)

By Paul Wilkinson in Blogs, Functionality, Future, Internet, SaaS
4 March 2008

If you read some of the online computing sites, you will already know that Microsoft – already involved in a project to take-over Yahoo to counter the Google threat and improve its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) credentials (see post) – is making moves to address the SaaS market opportunity. SME offerings of SaaS services got a lukewarm response from …

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/03/microsoft-gets/

Feb 29 2008

FTP security hole

By Paul Wilkinson in Collaboration, Extranet/CDE, Internet, Legal, SaaS
29 February 2008

Particularly in the early days of marketing construction collaboration technology solutions, we used to get occasional suggestions that online solutions were unnecessary as “our IT department has set up an FTP site for us to manage all that file-sharing”. Hopefully, those days are long gone, but for any construction businesses that may still be contemplating reliance …

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/ftp-security-ho/

Feb 28 2008

Not a wiki – Google Sites

By Paul Wilkinson in Collaboration, Functionality, Future, Internet, SaaS
28 February 2008

And so it came to pass…. As rumoured in December (see my post Google to target collaboration), the Google-acquired JotSpot has been relaunched as Google Sites, part of Google Apps (see Cnet post: JotSpot reincarnated as Google Sites, and Rafe Needleman’s Don’t call it a wiki: Google Sites finally launches). The Google Sites overview doesn’t use the term Wiki, …

Google, Google Apps, Google Sites, JotSpot, wiki

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/not-a-wiki-go/

Feb 27 2008

Delivering my first webinars

By Paul Wilkinson in AEC, Collaboration, Functionality, Future, Internet, Marketing, SaaS, Sustainability, Telecoms
27 February 2008

The flow of posts to this blog slowed slightly this week as I spent time preparing for, and then delivering two webinars for BIW Technologies [my employer]. The first of these online seminars related to use of online collaboration platforms to manage construction contract processes – particularly those associated with the New Engineering Contract (NEC); …

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/delivering-my-f/

Feb 22 2008

Lurking in the shadows

By Paul Wilkinson in AEC, Collaboration, Extranet/CDE, Functionality, Future, Internet, People issues, SaaS, Telecoms, Vendors
22 February 2008

Shadow IT is a term used to refer to those people performing IT functions within an organisation but who are not actually part of the official IT department. It can take many forms – from innocent reliance on advice from the unofficial Excel expert at the next desk, through use of work-arounds to bypass corporate systems, to the …

aaS, AEC, blogs, broadband, churn, collaboration, Construction, document management, email, feature bloat, intranet, IT department, SaaS, Shadow IT, Software-as-a-Service, wikis

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/lurking-in-the/

Feb 20 2008

AIR – taking web applications offline

By Paul Wilkinson in Functionality, Future, Internet, SaaS
20 February 2008

MIT’s Technology Review has published its 2008 list of emerging technologies that it thinks are most likely to change the way we live. One of them is “Offline web applications”. The article profiles an Adobe system: Adobe Integrated Runtime, AIR. The premise is that ‘Cloud computing’ has drawbacks: users can’t save data to their own hard drives, …

Adobe Integrated Runtime, Air, cloud computing, emerging technologies, Google Gears, MIT, offline web applications, Technology Review

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/air-taking-we/

Feb 18 2008

CADaaS continued (2)

By Paul Wilkinson in AEC, Business/Financial, Collaboration, Extranet/CDE, Functionality, Future, Internet, Marketing, People issues, ROI/benefits, SaaS
18 February 2008

My musings last week (here and here) on CAD-as-a-Service have stimulated some interest, including a SaaSblogs post, and a comment from Rami Hamodah, who, quite rightly, suggests that “offering CAD-as-a-Service is much harder to do than offering business software-as-a-service such as CRM” and wonders how demand might be stimulated. CADaaS: not if, when To respond to …

AEC, Alibre, AutoCAD, Autodesk Inventor, bandwidth, BIM, CAD-as-a-Service, CADaaS, collaboration, Construction, interoperability, Pareto principle, SaaS blogs, Sinclair Schuller, SolidWorks, TCO
6 comments

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/cadaas-contin-1/

Feb 13 2008

SaaS – the killer app for CAD?

By Paul Wilkinson in AEC, Business/Financial, Collaboration, Extranet/CDE, Functionality, Future, Internet, People issues, SaaS, Telecoms, Vendors
13 February 2008

Evan Yares’ CAD blog alerted me to a great article by Brian Seitz among the COFES blogs. Brian asks: Is SaaS the Killer App for the CAD Industry?, suggesting that: “the business model most major CAD vendors operate under – market share and maintenance annuities – is showing its age. It will not be long before an innovative …

24/7, 4Projects, AEC, AutoCAD, Autodesk, BIM, BIW, Brian Seitz, CAD, CADaaS, COFES, customisation, data ownership, DWF, escrow, Evan Yares, Integrated Project Delivery, interoperability, Killer App, MicroStation, NCCTP, PDF, project extranets, ProjectDraw, SaaS, security, Software-as-a-Service, system reliability
6 comments

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/saas-the-kill/

Feb 06 2008

Undersea hassles

By Paul Wilkinson in Blogs, Internet, SaaS, Telecoms
6 February 2008

Apart from what I call the Mihoogle (Microsoft/Yahoo/Google) situation (see previous post), software and internet issues also hit the mainstream media headlines last week following damage to undersea cables linking large parts of the internet. As BIW has expanded internationally, such problems have also affected our business: until Indian-based ISPs could reroute traffic around the Egypt …

BIW, Dubai, Google, Microsoft, Mihoogle, Nicholas Carr, undersea cables, Vadodara, Yahoo

Permanent link to this article: https://extranetevolution.com/2008/02/undersea-hassle/

Feb 06 2008

Microhoo, Yasoft, Mi-hoo, etc …

By Paul Wilkinson in Business/Financial, Future, Internet, SaaS
6 February 2008

Pity the poor analyst at Forrester Research who predicted last week that the wave of mega-acquisitions in the software industry was over for now (see InfoWorld article, for example), adding Microsoft will be ‘the least active’ in terms of acquisitions. Just days later, Microsoft announced a $44.6 billion unsolicited hostile bid for Yahoo (prompting suggestions of …