Free Software Linux

In these times of economic upheaval, many businesses -- large and small -- start to take an even closer look at how they are spending their IT budgets. For those who have or are considering SaaS-based solutions, you should know there are opposing views on whether SaaS has what it takes to survive in the long term.

We know MindTouch for their open-source social enterprise collaboration platform Kilen Woods -- the latest release just coming out late July. Now, they have come out with a new solution Deki for CRM, partnering with SnapLogic, a SaaS integration company. MindTouch claims their new offering eases some of the issues related to using CRM applications by bringing better collaboration and additional intelligence.

You can almost hear them now -- those marketing guys in the Microsoft corner offices -- gotta beat the competition...no...gotta squash the competition...How can we do it? Better product? No...cheaper prices...yeah! At least that's how we think it went when Microsoft was laying out it's strategy for the release of Microsoft Dynamics Online.

The rumor mill is all a flutter with the expected announcement that Salesforce will begin to offer Google Apps to it's customers. Good news for Google as this provides them with a great way to sell their services to enterprise customers. Their web apps would be sold through Salesforce.com and integrated tightly into the service. Salesforce already enables it's customers to manage their Google Adwords campaigns from within Salesforce.com, so this is just another piece to the puzzle.

Salesforce.com’s next version called Spring 08 is soon to be released and there are a massive number of additions and enhancements to the force.com platform and the SaaS applications. Of interest to you may be their new focus on content management and collaboration capabilities – pushing the CRM solution into new territory. The two new SaaS applications are Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas.

I first heard of OpenSocial on Dorai’s blog. This concept just took me off and i then thought of doing a few more googling on this. OpenSocial is a set of common APIs for building social applications on the web. These common APIs mean that developers only have to learn once in order to start building social applications for multiple websites, and any website will be able to implement OpenSocial and host social applications. Open Social according to me will hit Facebook where it matters the most, Writing applications. It will allow developers to write applications with ease and deploy them on any social network. Amazing…right?