I got a heads up from Zoli that Zoho business is now live. This comes on the back of the announcement by Zoho that Swisscom, Switzerland’s second largest telco, is using Zoho for it business applications requirements. Zoho has created a customised version of their applications and this has been made available to Swisscom’s 300000 customers.
Zoho business is a lovely little (or not so little) offering that includes office productivity, calendaring, contact management and mail. All in all it is a one-stop-shop for businesses basic software needs I’ll post specifically about Zoho business later.
Apparently Swisscom also use Gmail for their email needs which in itself is interesting - most Telco’s have gone the way of Microsoft hosted email solutions, it’s noteworthy that a telco, that is generally abut selling top shelf offerings, would go the way of free.
Swisscom have created a SaaS portal, Teamnet, which is pretty much the sort of aggregative SaaS platform that I posted about recently. Swisscom makes available the following offerings;
Zoho business apps
Teamspace collaboration service
Trust room conferencing services
Easy CRM
Project tracker
Teamnet is free until October 2008, thereafter Swisscom will begin charging for the services. It’s a very smart move for a Telco - their traditional revenue stream is being decimated, they’re generally good at large scale infrastructure projects and they’re totally used to a subscription model revenue stream.
A couple of announcements of late have me scratching my head in wonderment. First comes the post by Bernard Hickey about MissionOn. I posted about MissionOn back in February (yes, you saw it here first) and my appraisal was that it was a good example of how not to do lots of things - deliver a central government message, build a website or educate youth. The general consensus of mission-on is that it is ugly, ineffective and very, very expensive ($10mill expensive by all accounts).
Then the other day we had the announcement by the Inland Revenue Department that they had contracted a company to build a website, based on flash (oh my gawd!) to teach small and medium businesses how to meet their tax obligations.
I have two main concerns with this - one technical and one strategic. So here we go…
Flash is a bad bad idea
The idea of creating some sort of interactive amusement arcade went out around a decade ago. Small and medium businesses want information - they want it quick and they want it simple - animations and the like are demeaning and disrespectful of their intelligence and limited time resource. When talking to business (especially SME but others as well) keep your design simple and clean - and in this country where Internet speeds are low, keep it media light.
Who ya gonna trust?
Let’s get one thing clear - SME’s don’t trust government agencies, SME’s don’t trust fat cat consultants wearing expensive suits (disclosure - the only suit I own was bought in Cairo and you can imagine what I paid for it!). SME’s do however trust their peers - fact is that upwards of 80% of the “advice” that an SME will get will be from it’s peer group - either talking to other businesses they deal with, or over a BBQ or beer. A government department driven site is about as ineffective as a corporate driven site.
So Ben, nice theory - now put your money where your mouth is…
This stuff is easy to talk about but doing it is the proving ground. I’ve made mention in the past that I’m working on a project around creating a SME community and I’m slowly getting closer to opening the covers on it a little. I’ve been running SME’s for around 15 years. I’ve also spend a few years heavily involved with economic development and business advisory stuff. All that exposure gave me a pretty good handle on where the holes lie.
We’re planning on taking the wraps off fully just before Christmas - and you’ll be able to read more about it before then here - stay tuned!
When Microsoft revealed Equipt the other day (Diversity coverage here) there was much discussion as to whether it amounted to the totality of MS’s SaaS offering).
Well we didn’t have to wait long for an answer. At its worldwide partner conference in Houston this week, MS announced definitive road map and pricing for it’s next tranche of hosted applications. It’s bad news for the resellers but good news for on-demand as a class.
The offerings are targeted at business users and come in two flavours, Business Productivity Online and Deskless Worker. Microsoft is taking a broadside at Google here, trying to stem the flow of users moving to Google docs - unfortunately until MS adds it’s office productivity apps to it’s on-demand offerings, it will seem like a disjointed approach - while these tools allow subscription based on-demand use of SharePoint and live meeting, they do not as yet allow true on-demand office productivity app usage.
The offerings are thus far enablers for telecommuting allowing hosted email, calendaring and IM/presence. As an attempt to sweeten the offering for corporate IT departments, MS will deploy a simple interface which will allow rapid set up of these tools for new workers. A limited beta signup is available here.
MS has tried to appease resellers by offering kick-backs on the subscription fee, but it’s hard to imagine that there will be many very happy resellers out there - sensing the beginning of the end for their hyper lucrative business models.
Below is a diagram of the MS offerings announced thus far.
Over on RWW, Alex Iskold posted about email, asking whether or not it is in danger. Alex pointed out that there are some threats to email, in the form of Twitter, Instant messaging and SMS. Alex came up with a diagram to illustrate the areas that email has traditionally been used, and where it’s strengths lie;
Alex uses the fact that email is poor at broadcast, discussion and business to come to the conclusion that, while email isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, new tools are a threat to how much we do via email. He suggests a splitting of the ways - with consumers moving to new forms of communication and enterprise remaining wedded to email. It’s most informative to read the comments under the post - the consensus seems to be that email is here for the long haul.
Conceptually I’m all with Alex on this one, but in practice the reality is closer to what Zoli points out in his post. Twitter, IM and SMS are mainly used in a social context. The fact is that most employees will use these tools where appropriate, but will revert to email where an audit trail or a historical sequence is required.
More to the point we’re seeing tools such as Xobni that aim to make it easier to utilise the power of the network, directly via email. This, is to a certain extent reinforcing emails position as the medium of choice.
Sure Wiki’s and IM are great for some things (Wikis for a collaborative project, IM for short sharp “mindbursts”) but email is still the primary tool and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Zoli posted this diagram which try’s to depict the continuum for communication - I would title it the early adopters communication continuum but regardless of that it’s an interesting concept.
Either way email is here for the long haul - sure different products (be they add-ons like Xobni or disrupters like Gmail) will come and go but it’ll take something significant to damage the momentum that email has, especially within business use.
I got a heads up from Zoli that Zoho business is now live. This comes on the back of the announcement by Zoho that Swisscom, Switzerland’s second largest telco, is using Zoho for it business applications requirements. Zoho has created a customised version of their applications and this has been made available to Swisscom’s 300000 customers.![[Bloglines]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[BlogMarks]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/blogmarks.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[Reddit]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[Slashdot]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/slashdot.png)
![[Sphere]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/sphere.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://diversity.net.nz/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
