Product News News & Articles

Moving further into the hosted world just as they promised to late last year, Amazon Web Services (news, site) has announced the release of a handful of new tools for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Wanting users to spend less time and energy on the “muck” that is operational burdens and system admin, the new tools focus specifically on enabling visibility into the health and usage of AWS resources, enhancing application performance, and giving wallets a little break.

Zoho, the company behind the namesake web-hosted productivity application suite, has announced single-sign on capabilities that encompass their customer relationship management suite. With single sign-on, customers of various Zoho products such as CRM, Docs, Mail, Projects and so on can sign-in with their usernames/passwords just once while using the products simultaneously.

Zoho CRM is the last and final Zoho product to gain single-sign on capabilities.

Microsoft generally likes to keep a tight lock on their products and services. Their update site not working on any browser other than Internet Explorer and Silverlight not working with Linux are perfect examples. But thanks to Novell’s newest release -- Moonlight -- Linux users can now utilize Silverlight apps.

Colligo, the software vendor from Vancouver, British Columbia, has announced strong sales numbers for 2008 for its SharePoint related products. The software maker has reported that Q4 2008 sales increased 104% over Q4 2007. Year-over-year results were very positive too, with 2008 sales coming in at 111% more than 2007's yearly sales.

Colligo's SharePoint product line, while generating huge revenue figures, also received awards from various sources. Colligo Contributor Pro won the Microsoft Best of TechEd 2008 in the productivity and collaboration category and won the 2008 Editor's Best Awards from Windows IT Pro magazine.

Nearly everything can be stored and accessed in the cloud. But until now, an HTML coding editor has not been on that list. In an effort to increase the use of open web technology, Mozilla Labs, innovators of a variety of web technologies, has released an open web HTML editor framework.

Six Apart, in an effort to become even more involved in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) movement, has announced that its Movable Type blogging software will soon be available hosting providers that utilize the Parallels Application Packaging standard. With Movable Type on one of these web hosts, consumers will be able to purchase and launch Movable Type-powered blogs in a new, more fluid manner.

The APS format was written by Parallels and gives web hosting providers the ability to provision and install Movable Type on their hosting infrastructure. Since Movable Type is now APS-compliant, the web logging software can be loaded via the Parallels' Plesk control panel.

Many web hosts easily installed blogging software to web hosting customers today using WordPress, an open source competitor to Movable Type. Today’s news from Six Apart will give those who want to launch a blog yet another choice.

It is no surprise that Six Apart is trying to become more entrenched in the Software-as-a-Service model. This hosted service model is attractive for software vendors and consuming companies as well. For the software vendors, they can gain a recurring regular flow of income. On the flip side, consumers of hosted applications can set up software environments cheaply and quickly with limited IS support.

One of the major hurdles for those investigating document management systems is the method for populating the system with data. As we all know, data entry is both time-consuming and costly.

PaperHost, the Software-as-a-Service document management system provider, has announced a product that aims to streamline data capture. phUPLOAD allows remote offices or employees to easily transmit scanned documents into the document management system.

Jott, a popular voice-to-text web service, has announced that they are putting an end to the free edition of their service effective February 2, 2009. The company cited a downturn in the web advertising market as the reason for ceasing the free version of the Jott service.

Have you been looking to recommend a popular hosted Web Content Management platform and make a little money at the same time? If so, YikeSite has an announcement that might interest you. YikeSite, the SaaS Web CMS service we wrote about in 2007, has a newly instituted reseller program.

The British Columbia-based, Ruby on Rails-powered content management service is apparently trying do drum up support by offering a 50/50 split in revenues if you resell their services. In exchange, YikeSite resellers get to rebrand any website with their own website's look and feel. The reseller site includes:

• Your own sign-up page
• Custom URLs
• Dashboard of customer activity
• Revenue snapshot (with dollar figures and online sales reports)

To get your own unique URL and start the process, visit www.yikesite.com/signup. The details of the reseller program work like this: you get a 50% discount off the regular plans, and then you are able to bill your clients at full price. This offer is valid with the Small Biz (US$ 24.00 per month) or Big Biz (US$ 45.00 per month) YikeSite plan.

Now that Amazon Web Services is starting to gain traction in the hosted application market, AWS today announced a new tool that will allow Amazon Web Service users to keep tabs on their AWS services. The first release of the management console is focused on the Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), AWS' virtualized server computing resource.

We have seen tools such as Ylastic that allow for monitoring of AWS utilities such as Amazon EC2, S3, SQS and SimpleDB, but the newly released tool from Amazon Web Services is the first to originate from AWS itself.

Skype has released a new version of a VoIP client for the Apple Macintosh platform that adds some new and unique features. Version 2.8, which was released in beta, adds two major new features including the ability to share your screen with other Skype users and access Boingo's global hotspot network on a per-minute basis.

The Skype user community was surprised by the new, unique features to the Mac client. In the past, the Mac client has lagged behind the more widely used Windows client in functionality.

High-impact rich media is a goal of many companies in regards to their websites. Adobe is here to help solve that problem and keep it cost-effective to publish such media. They bring to you Adobe Scene7, a comprehensive SaaS platform that provides scalability, ease of use and the use of integrated technologies.

Regardless of the global economic uncertainty, online advertising is not going anywhere.

Why? One word: analytics.

Now that the acquisition of Captaris by Open Text is no longer an intention but a fact, what does the Enterprise CMS giant plan to do with this Washington-based provider of document management and delivery solutions?

EPiServer, a Swedish Web CMS vendor, announced the introduction of multiple new features for its content management system EPiServer CMS 5, including the mobile industry solutions (think the iPhone here), new environment support and improved usability for editors.

EPiServer CMS 5 R2 is yet another step in the evolution of this Web CMS that promises to speed up the development of web sites and make it easier to manage and update them.