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December 22, 2006

A hot topic of SAAS continues

A hot topic of SAAS (software-as-a-service) continues. This delivery model popularity is expected to grow fast in the coming years.

Gartner predicts that by 2011, 25% of new software will be delivered as software as a service and by 2009, more than 50% of new business software vendors will claim a SAAS delivery model. It is acceptable for companies of all sizes, although the requirements for SAAS implementations could vary from security and regulatory compliance to integration to administrative control.

More than 60% SMBs see on-demand service as a way to cut cost and increase productivity. A small size company can get an immediate benefit of the offered software without investing in hardware and involving their IT stuff. More broad range of software can be used with lower cost of entry and less risky investment. Pay-as-you-go strategy is applied meaning most companies can subscribe for software as a service instead of making a huge capital investment.

From a document management perspective SAAS opens doors to many companies for a paperless environment, easy access via an Internet browser, faster work processes, security, reporting, administration, and many other improvements.

December 22, 2006 | Comments (0)
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December 04, 2006

Web Design Woes - AJAX and CSS

What is new on the dev side of DocuVantage? More AJAX functionality and more use of CSS to keep the app standards-compliant.

As any web app designer that must keep up with standards knows, this can be quite challenging. You can build a web app and have it looking great in one browser, but when viewed in another browser it is completely unusable.

In the arena of AJAX the problem can be resolved by using AJAX libraries that were created by another developer that already ironed out the browser-specific issues. Although there are times we do need to create functionality from scratch, and as if on queue, these issues rear their ugly heads. When creating a site design from scratch, you get used to dealing with the CSS incompatibilities.

A lot of this could have been avoided if Microsoft could have just worked with Netscape back when XUL came out, 7 years ago (wow!). You see, AJAX is really just one big hack. Sure it's cool, but it's not pretty. The folks at Netscape saw the need for an XML-based UI language long ago and so they created XUL. Just search for XUL to find out more.

December 4, 2006 | Comments (0)
Posted by Sarel Botha