Saas News & Articles

Web CMS outfit Clickability (news, site) adds an integrated development environment to allow customization and flexibility for its on-demand CMS product.

 A new partnership between cloud content management provider SpringCM (news, site) and technology consulting company Acumen will bring cloud-based solutions to government agencies, particularly document management and workflow solutions.

The release date for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 is out and about, but not everyone is happy with some of the details. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the company has ambitions with this release for a fully functioning Office in the cloud.

This week, new research shows a huge increase in the use of video email in SMBs. In the meantime, Symantec released email security SMB edition with simplified licensing.

With the acquisition of eWebHealth, Hyland Software (news, site) has not only tightened its grip on the healthcare market, but also adds new solutions provided by eWeb, in particular medical records and revenue cycle workflow solutions.

The will-we-won’t-we debate over the deployment of Cloud-based solutions continues. This time its Cloud technology consultancy Saugatuck’s (news, site) turn arguing in their latest report that while it is inevitable that enterprises will take to the Cloud, it is effective management of  Cloud deployments that will make it successful or not.

Central Desktop (news, site), a cheapy SharePoint alternative, recently announced a significant update to the SaaS social technology platform. Central Desktop 2.0 brings an enhanced user interface and new features, including online file viewing, to the game.  

What to watch this year when it comes to the enterprise? The ever-wise Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDNet has his money on the growth of SaaS and Social Computing, but he's not holding his breath. 

This week we turn back to social media and a new report that shows most companies are still only dabbling with social media as a business tool, while the Parallels 2010 conference confirms what most of us suspect: the SMB cloud market is going to be huge over the next five years.

The XML content management system vendor DocZone (news, site) which was bought out last year by Really Strategies (news, site) has just added another pricing scheme to its SaaS offering for publishers and technical writers, by offering them the option to pay-per-page.

Under the new pay-per-page option, users will be given full system capabilities for editorial and production with access to all features, the amount they pay is based on the number of final pages produced.

And really that’s not bad when you consider that DocZone Publisher is an "all inclusive" Web-based editorial and production system that supports the creation, management, translation and single-source publishing of content.

Powered by the open-source Alfresco CMS platform, DocZone Publisher includes:

• An authoring tool for distributed teams accessed via a browser
• Easy and efficient search and query of all content
• Numerous content management abilities including versioning and access control
• Workflow management
• Language translation tools.

When Really Strategies bought DocZone in July last year we speculated that by combining the two most price efficient solutions on the market -- Web CMS from Really Strategies and SaaS publishing from DocZone --  users could be looking at considerable economies for the future.

This new pay-per-page scheme would seem to bear that out with the only question now being what other pricing packages we will see in the future.
 

Awards season rolls on and some familiar names are lined up in the many categories for the CODiEs (news, site), now in their 25th year.

Continuing on with their Software-as-a-Service adventure thanks to a partnership with Parallels, Bitrix (news, site) has announced that it’s working on a new initiative for delivering their Intranet Portal through a SaaS deployment model.  

We have a mixed bag of news for SMBs with conflicting views on whether social media is good or bad for business. There was a lot of other research published this week giving a considerable amount to think about for companies in, or thinking about entering the tech fray.

The upgrade to Bitrix’s Virtual Appliance for Amazon EC2 from 1.4 to 1.5 adds a number of improvements that the company says will enhance the user performance of its content management and enterprise content management software.

With a whole pile of pre-configured settings to nip any software compatibility issues in the bud, Bitrix (news, site) says the new release will speed up all the processes and increase the performance of all the components through its built-in mechanisms.

This version allows users to install Bitrix Site Manager and Bitrix Intranet Portal, or any other applications that use the PHP platform, quicker and more efficiently than previous versions. It also includes the most recent version of the Bitrix web environment with optimized memory usage.

It is protected by both Amazon EC2 security settings and by an integrated firewall which is set up automatically. It also now supports all three data center location regions -- US Standard, US N. California, EU -- Ireland -- after recent EC2 development.

However, that is not all you get. It also comes with the beta release of Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Device) customized for Bitrix users giving them 1TB of back-up power for web projects and intranet portals.

Bitrix’s Virtual Appliance is free to download once you have logged in to Amazon Web Services.

According to recent research from Gartner (news, site), document management will be one of the top 10 technology priorities for CIOs in 2010. Reminiscent of 2009 top 10 strategic technologies, virtualization and cloud computing challenges will also keep CIOs on their toes this year.