The Applied ICT A2-level Project Management class at Haslingden High School, located in Manchester, England, needed a better way to collaborate on projects in order to fulfill a requirement to learn project management techniques and work together from school and from home.
Wise Systems and Solutions put them in contact with Matt Duncan of NetDocuments who granted the class a NetDocuments basic account to enable them to complete their project.
After completion of their semester, they sent us the following report:
Objective 1: To meet the requirements of the specification for students to use project management tools and techniques appropriate to team working.
“We were able to utilise and report the use of standard ways of working.”
“The majority of students worked really well with the principle of copying their team’s inbox folder in on all project related emails.”
Objective 2: To provide a practical solution for storing files to allow collaboration between team members at school and from home.
The students entered their final year of ICT studies knowing that there are a number of issues associated with working on the school network that hamper productivity. Such as only having limited user rights; down time because of viruses; USB sticks banned; and no connection of own laptops.
As a group we were very appreciative of a better solution than emailing attachments backwards and forwards between home and school.
A few students were a bit alarmed when the files they uploaded to NetDocuments were “moved” not “copied”. They obviously didn’t read the dialogue box when it appeared! The higher achieving students quickly came to trust that the file in the NetDocuments repository was the only version required.
I had initially informed students that we would not have full functionality because we were working on Office 2000, but in practice we did not seem to experience any restrictions.
The following quote is from student KF at the end of the unit: “NetDocuments is a good system, as it has the vast amount of facilities that make it ideal for uploading work from anywhere. However, I think the downside is what we found in unit 8. Firstly the [confusion about] lack of compatibility with older versions of office namely 2000 and also the [delay surrounding] integration with networks such as the one at school. If this worked fine within school, it would be a big asset”
Conclusion: I am extremely pleased with my students’ development using NetDocuments. I am proud that they will go on to university or employment with this experience and understanding of the principles of online document management.
NetDocuments would like to thank Haslingden High School for their innovative approach to teaching and project building.
It’s that time of year again, kids are getting ready to go back to school, the snow cone stand outside NetDocuments HQ is packed with sales and support staff and the annual ILTA technology conference is about to begin.
This year, the ILTA Conference is being held in Las Vegas and will get underway on August 22nd and run until August 26th. We’ll be there all week at booth #809/811. The theme for this year is Strategic Unity and should cover a number of relevant topics such as mobility, cloud computing and more.
NetDocuments will have a large constituency at the show including members of the sales team, marketing group and management, and as always, we are excited to meet with our customers and old friends as well as build new relationships. We’ve also got some new surprises for this year’s show…
Cloud Lounge
This year our booth is a bit different than usual…as always our sales team will be doing what they do on one side, while on the other side we’ve built our very own Cloud Lounge. I’m not at liberty to reveal exactly what will be going on at the Cloud Lounge so be sure to check it out at the show.
What happens in Vegas…
What happens in Vegas…shows up on Twitter. The social media buzz surrounding ILTA has already started and we’ll definitely be involved, so make sure you follow the @NetDocuments Twitter feed during the show as well as the #ILTA10 hashtag to possibly win prizes and stay current on all things ILTA 2010.
Executive Briefing Room
Other than our booth and Cloud Lounge, we are going to have an executive briefing room to meet with potential customers as well as show previews and roadmap material to existing customers. If you’d like to schedule a time to meet with a sales rep during ILTA, drop an email to sales@netdocuments.com
Notable Sessions
There will be a number of informative sessions during the show but there were a few that really got us here at NetDocuments excited.
Email Management Success Stories – Aug. 24th at 9:00am with Chris Romano of Ward and Smith PA
Cloud Nine or in a Fog? – Aug. 24th at 11:00am with Mark Manoukian of Kegler Brown and Lawrence Gianneschi of Colgate-Palmolive Legal Department
Cost Effective Solutions for Web Filtering and Monitoring – Aug. 24th at 3:30 with Mark Manoukian of Kegler Brown
Post written by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments marketing team.
The NetDocuments legal team is getting excited about their trip to Boston for the Association of Legal Administrators’ (ALA) Annual Conference & Exposition from May 3-6 2010. We will be represented by Keith Schneider, Matt Duncan and Kirsten Walker who will be hanging out at booth #306 talking legal technology and SaaS, as well as giving out a free iPad. Stop by the booth for more details.
ALA has done a fantastic job this year preparing for the event and providing ways for those that can’t make it to participate. They have already created some informative videos about the show and have an interactive Twitter account at @ALABuzz. Furthermore, the Twitter #hashtag for the show is #ALAConf and you can find everyone that will be tweeting from the show at the ALA Conference Twitter List.
ALA has also lined up great speakers and presenters for the educational sessions with a lineup that features various industry leaders, and even includes hall of fame baseball players.
This is the second straight year that NetDocuments will be at the ALA Conference and this year we will be the only SaaS content management provider and only document management service that is used by both small and large firms at the show so we’ll do our best to represent the SaaS and cloud computing market.
OREM, UTAH – February 17, 2010 – NetDocuments, the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) content management service provider, announced today it has completed the SAS 70 Type I audit, and it has also completed the Truste EU Safe Harbor Certification, acknowledging that NetDocuments delivers its SaaS content management service and its web site in accordance with these standards.
The SAS 70 standard (Statement on Auditing Standards No.70) was developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), and is an internationally recognized auditing standard. SAS 70 designation represents that the AICPA or its designees have conducted a rigorous audit of the NetDocuments controls and safeguards over its information technology and all related processes.
SAS 70 Type I audit describes the company’s internal controls at a point in time and assesses whether they were suitably described to achieve control objectives. In six month’s time, NetDocuments will complete the SAS 70 Type II audit demonstrating the operational effectiveness of its controls over a period of time, and then maintain it year after year.
The TRUSTe EU Safe Harbor Seal communicates that a Web site has committed to protecting the privacy of EU visitors through compliance with the EU-US Safe Harbor Framework and participation in TRUSTe’s Watchdog Consumer Dispute Resolution service. The EU-US Safe Harbor Framework was developed by the U.S. Department of Commerce in concert with the European Commission to provide a framework by which US companies may comply with EU privacy directives protecting the personal information of European citizens.
“It’s absolutely essential for NetDocuments’ customers to have confidence in their hosted services provider and ensure we have effective controls, standards and infrastructure in place to comprehensively protect their data,” said Ken Duncan, CEO at NetDocuments. “We are committed to do everything we can to service our customers with the highest standards.”
Post authored by Danny Johnson of the NetDocuments Sales and Marketing Team
Every year Gartner, Inc. identifies the 10 strategic technologies for the year ahead. It released the 2010 edition in October and I found the results very interesting.
For Gartner to consider a technology, a “strategic technology,” it must have the “potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.”
The number one technology on the 2010 list is one that we at NetDocuments are very close to and have been doing for the past 10 years — that is “Cloud Computing.”
“Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others.” – Gartner
Listed below are the other nine strategic technologies for 2010:
Advanced Analytics
Client Computing
IT for Green
Reshaping the Data Center
Social Computing
Security – Activity Monitoring
Flash Memory
Virtualization for Availability
Mobile Applications
It was interesting to note that many of the technologies mentioned are in some form related to cloud computing or SaaS. These include “IT for Green,” “Reshaping the Data Center” and “Mobile Applications.” I will highlight each one of these below, as well as “Social Computing,” as it has become even more relevant to the business enterprise with Salesforce.com’s announcement of Chatter.
IT for Green
There are many ways to move to a more environmentally friendly workplace. The last decade saw companies do this by moving to a less paper office with the help of scanners and document management systems to reduce paper waste. The next step for these companies is to reduce energy waste by getting rid of their servers and moving to SaaS and the cloud.
Reshaping the Data Center
Gartner talks about this point in terms of design principles and mentions how a pod-based data center design approach can save space and is more efficient. I propose to take that one step farther by suggesting that a cloud-based design approach can save even more space and is even more efficient. That is because much of the data center can be eliminated by going SaaS and storing data in the cloud.
Mobile Applications
This one actually surprised me. Not because it made the list, but because it was not higher on the list. Gartner states that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will be using mobile devices capable of running rich web applications. Many software providers have already released apps for the iPhone and Android OS that provide rich functionality from anywhere in the world, and cloud computing companies such as ourselves and Salesforce.com allow users to access their entire DMS or CRM directly from the mobile device.
Social Computing
Social media is certainly on everyones radars with the popularity of Twitter and other social networks, and this point was made clearer at Dreamforce 09 when Salesforce.com announced their new Chatter feature. Chatter, which is billed as the “Facebook for the Enterprise” brings social networks to the business enterprise. To learn more about Chatter and social computing for business, read Marc Duncan’s recent blog titled, “Dreamforce Offers Glimpse into the Future of SaaS and Social Media.”
In the late 90’s when NetDocuments was founded, we were one of the worlds first SaaS companies and have since witnessed first hand the evolution of the SaaS market. Recently, Service-Now.com released a white paper titled, “A Brief History of SaaS,” and I found it very accurate and informative.
The white paper begins by discussing where traditional boxed software comes up short and how this created the need for SaaS:
“Organizations soon find that while traditional software can be customized, it often leads to version-lock and the inability to preserve changes through an upgrade. Simple upgrades become costly, … [and] shrink-wrapped software can’t realistically support the specific needs of today’s modern enterprise.”
In this testimonial from new NetDocuments customer Ward and Smith P.A., their CIO Chris Romano expresses this same sentiment when his law firm was faced with the task of an expensive software upgrade.
The next step in understanding the history of SaaS is understanding the difference between ASPs (Application Service Providers) and true SaaS offerings. In the late nineties during the tech bubble, ASPs were becoming very popular but ultimately, the ASP model failed:
“ASPs [were] brokers of legacy software that businesses didn’t want to own or manage themselves. Each ASP would be responsible for buying and maintaining the client/server software, and making it available to customers from data centers owned and operated by the ASPs…[but] because of the inherent limitations of traditional software, the ASPs eventually failed.”
With the decline of ASPs, a new way to deliver software emerged and that was SaaS. Over the last 10 years, we have seen the market for SaaS products grow at an ever increasing rate, and we only expect the growth of SaaS to continue. With this growth, many legacy software companies are trying to mold their existing products into SaaS offerings. This issue is accurately addressed in “A Brief History of SaaS:”
“Traditional software vendors have numerous barriers to entry to the SaaS market. Old technology cannot morph into SaaS. A SaaS application needs to be built from scratch using modern Web technologies. Legacy vendors also have to deal with organizational challenges that include converting to a subscription license model, retraining sales and fulfilling a new compensation, disruptions to revenue streams and stock valuations, and converting customers who are using the old technology.”
Although the history of SaaS is relatively short, it has made a significant impact on computing over the past decade and we believe that it has a very important role in continuing to define how computing is done now, and over the next decade as well.
