Zoho Project

I’m more and more impressed with the Zoho products by the day. Using Zoho project instead of OpenProj.

Accenture on Cloud Computing

At a recent CIO conference the Chief Scientist at Accenture Kishore Swaminathan opined on Cloud Computing. “
However, Swaminathan cautioned that “cloud computing” is not mature enough for CIOs to build a strategy upon just yet. He said: “Issues like security and privacy still have to be addressed” but the cloud is “more secure than companies think”.

He seems to contradict himself here. There can’t be any doubt that hosting your applications and data in the cloud is very often much more secure that storing data on local machines. specially for SME’s which have little or no focus on security.

As for his quote “Cloud computing” is now mature enough for CIOs to “experiment” with. This may be driven somewhat by enlightened self interest in Accentures part(and other consulting firms part) in that they are making alot more revenue from servicing traditional ERP/CRM systems that are very complicated to set up and configure. Originally in their focus on the SME market in recent times they had probably planned to generate revenue using much the same model for SME’s as for Corporates.

Run your business with Zoho

The last few months I’ve been road testing the Zoho applications by using it for my own company’ day to day administration. Originally Zoho was best known for their meeting application software which was a great substitute for WebEx. Over the last year they’ve constantly added new useful apps and at this stage have almost anything that any SME business would need.

One of my personal favourites is Zoho Invoicing which is a quick and very smart way to generate estimates and invoices http://invoice.zoho.com/login/jsp/login.jsp).

Better still it integrates into Zoho CRM. Check out the complete range of tools at www.zoho.com.

I’m happy to recommend this to other companies so if you’re interested in learning more and possibly implementing some of the Zoho tools in your organisation contact me. It may even possible to negotiate a cut price rate for the first few clients

Amazon Elastic IP Addresses, EXT JS

Amazon this week released the Elastic IP service and Availability Zones which should make it easier to host high availability web sites and web services.

In the grails world there is a new plugin for grails which should allow scaffolding for using ExtJS Ajax toolkit. Hopefully will have time to try this out.

Even more exciting is the release of the Adobe Flex toolkit for the force.com platform. I’ve never been a big fan of the salesforce.com user interface. Otherwise I’d be totally sold as it’s a powerful platform. I don’t know yet whether a complete user interface can be developed to sit on top of a force.com back-end or whether it’s just widgets as seems to be the case in the showcase on the force.com website.