Conformity Provides Enterprise Management Platform for Cloud Applications

October 22, 2009 at 12:14 pm · Filed under Reviews

SaaS applications are becoming more pervasive as enterprises realize the speed, flexibility and cost reductions they bring. However, the spread of multiple SaaS apps in an enterprise raises the issue of siloed management. The Conformity platform provides a centralized point of management for all cloud applications and users, and includes user provisioning, role management, workflow approvals, directory integration, compliance reporting, usage analytics and change management capabilities. They announced their initial general reIease on September 30. I spoke with Scott Bils, co-founder and CMO, about their offering.

Scott said that they recognized that SaaS would be the way of the future. However, as enterprises implement multiple SaaS applications they will need a means to manage them.  Conformity is designed to offer the centralized management platform to go across silos. For example, a salesperson might use a CRM app, a collaboration app, an incentive app, and an expense management app. They would have to provisioned with all these apps and their usage monitored. Then, if they leave, they would have to be checked out of each app.  Frequently, these apps might be administered by four different people. Firms need to be able to both monitor usage for expense control but also for compliance issues.  With Conformity, the management of all four apps could be combined in one central function with automatic provisioning.

Here is a sample administration screen shot. The applications being managed are on the left. The usage data is shown in the bar chart and the workflows tasks are shown on the right. In the central space under the usage charts, you can see the events occurring within the system.

Scott mentioned that many SaaS applications provide open APIs to facilitate the automation of provisioning and monitoring.  Others require some manual effort but Conformity can generate a notification email to the right person to make management more efficient. The Conformity solution is designed to provide the same level of visibility and control over on-demand applications that IT organizations expect with traditional packaged apps.  This will ease some of the concern that IT has over bringing new cloud applications into their business environments as they know there will not be compromises made in the areas of management processes, insight and control. Here is a sample user access screen.

Specific capabilities of the Conformity solution include user provisioning with centralized point of provisioning and deprovisioning of users accounts within cloud applications, and ongoing management of user permissions and authorizations. There is also role and profile management to enable organizations to centrally manage cloud application roles, profiles and permissions through normalized permission models, and maps policies to users and roles. Conformity also supports directory integration for Microsoft Active Directory, and is compatible with industry standards such as SPML, SAML and WS-Federation.

Approval workflows provide auditable cross-functional approval processes for users requiring new or amended access permissions, or role and profile changes. Directory integration enables organizations to seamlessly synchronize Conformity’s user repository with on-premise directory services. Compliance reporting provides reports required for effective preparation for audits for SOX, HIPAA, PCI and other regulatory mandates and standards. Usage analytics provides visibility, analytics and reporting on cloud application and license utilization and change management enables archiving, management and recovery of application configurations and role models.

There two types of reports. First, for public companies there are the compliance reports required by SOX including user access (shown below), user change, and the segregation of duties report that goes across applications. There is also usage tracking for financial monitoring purposes.

Conformity has also led the creation of an Enterprise SaaS Working Group, which it conceptualized and organized. This group of SaaS and cloud experts will share their perspectives on how enterprises can best leverage, and manage these new on-demand applications in their business environments.  They will discuss issues and corresponding best practices in the areas of: management and governance, security and compliance, and APIs and management access, Here is a recording of their first meeting.

I think that Conformity provides a much needed service to accelerate the adoption of SaaS applications. It should make IT organizations more comfortable moving to SaaS and enables organizations to better realize the savings and flexibility that SaaS offers.

Digsby takes connectivity to a higher level

May 28, 2009 at 6:58 am · Filed under Reviews, social media

I’ve recently featured the fantastic Nutshellmail, a social networking aggregator that keeps your social media life in control. It provides a simple yet effective way to manage your various accounts by sifting through everything and sending you scheduled summaries thru email. Definitely a great idea for people who want to stay connected but don’t fancy social networking taking over their lives.

The question is, how about those for whom social networking is not a mere diversion but an essential/central component of their work? These people might need to get real-time updates to be able to respond to clients, so having scheduled daily digests just won’t cut it. A desktop application called Digsby could solve the problem. It’s an even more feature-packed aggregator – one that combines social networking, Twitter, emails AND instant messaging in one program.

With it, you can stay updated on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Twitter, as well as chat with your friends on Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Jabber, and Facebook Chat. It can also access your emails so you can be notified instantly of incoming messages. It’s free to download and I’m glad to say it installed on my Windows 7 Beta PC without any hitch. Adding different social network accounts was a simple matter of providing my credentials for each. So far, Digsby has been running smoothly without any errors.

There are chat clients out there like Trillian and Pigdin, but as of now only Digsby offers social media support. When it detects new updates from Twitter, for example, a small pop-up will appear at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, flashing the tweet for a few seconds. You can also read a list of the most recent updates for each social networking and email account:

Be careful to uncheck some options during installation if you don’t like the program to change your homepage or install any other “freebies”. This being a desktop application and not a web app, you might need administrator rights on your office PC to install it. This limitation might make this tool more appropriate for telecommuters and other mobile workers who have full control over their workstations. Some people have complained that Digsby could have been more useful had the program included RSS support, and they have a point, but maybe that’s a little bit of overkill. Anyway, I’m happy to check my feeds via Google Reader, which has a lot of great features just for RSS. Lastly, anyone’s who has tried it will know that instant messaging can be time-waster, and along with constant updates from social networks, one might lose a lot of productive hours on Digsby. As in everything else, one must practice prudence and self-restraint.

NutshellMail, a way to restore order in your social life

May 20, 2009 at 10:14 am · Filed under Reviews, social networks

The social networking landscape is evolving fast. Myspace used to be “IT” a few years ago, but now Facebook is taking over, and don’t forget LinkedIn if you’re out to do professional networking. Then there’s the surging popularity of Twitter (and God knows what’s next). It can be difficult to choose just one of them as your home on the web. Often, you sign up where your friends already are, and usually they’re scattered among these sites. If you sign up for everything, it can be tough to keep up.

Nutshellmail is a web tool that attempts to put some sanity back into your life. Instead of logging on to these sites one by one to check if there’s anything new, or sifting through a ton of email notifications on your inbox, Nutshellmail gathers all the updates for you. Friend requests, status updates, tweets, and more are summarized, then sent in one neat little email. No more cluttered inbox. This alone can save you a lot of precious time.

The great thing about it is that these summaries are interactive. For example, you can retweet, update your status, and reply to comments all without leaving your email client. You can also customize when you want to receive these updates by choosing particular days and hours. I’ve scheduled mine to be sent twice daily, once in the morning and another in the late afternoon.

If you have multiple email accounts, you can configure Nutshellmail to include new message summaries for these secondary emails. This way, your primary email serves as your central console, from which you have a bird’s eye view of all messages coming in. Only the subject lines and senders will be included in the Nutshellmail update. However, clicking on a “Get” link will provide the means to push an email of interest to your primary account. Within seconds, you can read it and take appropriate action from there.

You can open an account on Nutshellmail for free, and the whole process couldn’t be simpler. After using it for a little while, I’m sure it’s going to be part of my routine from now on (until something better comes along). It’s an excellent idea. The only thing that I wish was different is the number of compatible social networks. Right now, it only supports the Big Four (Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter), but there are many other notable players with their own strong regional user base. Let’s hope Nutshellmail expands their menu soon.

MindMeister, online mind mapping application

December 19, 2008 at 1:56 pm · Filed under Reviews, Web Apps

Mind mapping has become my default method of organizing my personal thoughts and planning business tasks. My preferred desktop application is Mindjet Mind Manager, and it serves me well, but I thought I’d check one of the more popular web-based equivalent – MindMeister.

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First impressions were good. I appreciated the working demo they placed right on their front page, so you can try it without the inconvenience of having to register. The site also has a short video demo/tutorial that explains most of what a would-be user needs to know. Once you’re ready to take the plunge, signing up is easy because the site allows using your existing Open ID accounts (Yahoo!, Wordpress, etc).

The AJAX-based user interface is well-thought out. It’s clean and intuitive – definitely simpler than Mindjet Mind Manager, without negatively affecting its usefulness. The map itself dominates the screen, flanked by menus on top, bottom, and a sidebar. As always, the mind map starts with a central idea that branches out in all directions in various levels, depending on how detailed you’d like to go (for more on mind mapping techniques, click here). Adding nodes to the chart is a cinch, and manipulating the mind map is just a matter of dragging items to their desired place.

The sidebar features the Navigator, which shows you exactly where you are on the map, gives you the ability to zoom in and out, to go to the center, or to switch between maps. It also has the controls for basic text formatting, as well as the icons which you can place beside each item on the map for added effect. Extras include provisions for notes, links, attachments, and tasks.

Real-time collaboration is possible, and can even work with Skype, if needed (I was not able to try this feature, though). Like most web apps, documents can be readily shared with others. Export options include .rtf, .pdf, .jpg, .gif, .png, .mm, .mmap, and .mind, the default MindMeister file format. Programmers can extend this application through the MindMeister API.

You can sign up on MindMeister for free, but the biggest drawback is that you’re only limited to storing 6 mind maps at a time. Paid accounts, meanwhile, start from $4/month, can host an unlimited number of maps, and enable working offline using Google Gears, among other benefits. Despite the limitations of the free account, MindMeister is a good way to start learning about mind mapping for the curious. I only wish there was a way to draw lines and basic shapes on the map, to connect nodes coming off separate branches. Other than that, I have no complaints about this solid mind mapping tool.

Thorny Little Issue of Software Registration Details

December 1, 2008 at 12:20 am · Filed under Reviews, Tips + Pointers

Techcrunch has declared the death of packaged software, noting Microsoft’s opening of the Microsoft Store on the Web this past week.

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say packaged software is “dead” and that suddenly all software will be purchased and downloaded from the Web.  However, it’s clear that packaged software has been in the throes of death for a long time. But it won’t be a quick and painless death.  It will be years before packaged software goes away, if it ever does completely.  (What about the software that comes loaded on your computer from the retailer?  Don’t see that going away anytime soon.)

The convenience of being able to purchase a software application on the Web and download it immediately can’t be beat.  But it also raises another thorny little issue:  what happens when you switch computers? 

Typically you’re given an activation key and required to register your copy of the software. But those activation codes are hard to keep track of.  What do you do if you get a new computer and need that activation key, but can’t locate the original version?  It’s not in the software provider’s interests to help you re-discover your key (I know — I’ve had to ask a couple of times and each time the answer was “we can’t help you”).  It’s especially an issue for small businesses of under 10 employees — typically they have no in-house tech support and usually are DIYers for computers issues.

Some small business owners I know have been using RoboForm to store the increasing number of passwords that you need for online applications.   It also has a RoboForm2Go license where you store all the information on a USB drive and carry the USB drive with you.  That way it stays independent of any particular computer.

Not only can a solution like RoboForm help you store passwords but it can keep track of all those software activation codes and other details you may need if one computer goes kaput or is inaccessible.  When you have to do it yourself in a small business, a solution like RoboForum is an important detail.

ShowDocument: Real-time multi-user collaboration tool

November 17, 2008 at 5:56 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Reviews, Web Apps

It’s easy to collaborate when the other person is sitting next to you. You can point to a specific sentence in a document, illustrate your idea through impromptu sketches, and write notes on the page margins. On the other hand, working with someone remotely is a different ball game. It can be challenging to get your point across via email, for example, sometimes resulting in lengthy back and forth exchanges. There’s definitely a need for better remote collaboration tools.

ShowDocument is a web application that tries to fill in this gap:

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The service is free and requires no registration. By following the simple directions on the site’s home page, I was able to go live within seconds – easy and fuss-free. You can invite other people to join you in a session by sending them email or providing a code for that session. Once they’ve accepted, you can all talk via web chat on an embedded client on the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

Below the chat box is the Tool Box, containing a pen, a highlighter, an eraser, and a text tool, all of which you can use to write on top of your document, as if it was ordinary paper. All the people invited to the session can use this tool box. Here’s a screen shot of my (rather clumsy) first test to play around with it:

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If you made a mistake, you can use the Undo button for incremental changes, Clear all of the marks on the screen in one click, or just the marks created by each tool. After you’re done, you may save the document, along with the notes drawn during the session, into a PDF file (from my trials, this worked flawlessly).

The current beta version of ShowDocument accepts .txt, .doc, .pdf, .ppt, .xls, and even image files like .jpg, and .gif. Aside from English, it also supports documents written in Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. If you’re worried about security, according to the site, documents are erased from their databases shortly after the sessions are terminated.

I can see this web app being useful in school projects, remote lawyer-client consultations, article editing, and a host of other situations. I, for one, am planning to use ShowDocument with some co-workers. Being free and having no need to register, it will be easy to get others to use this with you. Great idea, great execution.

Tizra provides Self-Service Web Site Development for Content Providers

November 16, 2008 at 6:19 pm · Filed under Reviews

Tizra Publisher is an online sales and distribution platform for electronic books and other document-based content.  The MIT Press CISnet (seen below) site is one of the sites built on this platform. Recently, I spoke with two of the co-founders, David Durand their CEO, and Anne Orens, the CMO.  Tizra is delivered on a SaaS basis that is a departure from most web site development tools.  David said he was involved in the development of many custom web sites for content distributors such as Oxford University Press. He saw many of the problems associated with outsourced custom and customer web site development and wanted to provide an easy to use solution.

Tizra enables publishers to bypass the content conversion, software development and maintenance costs traditionally associated with custom publishing websites. At the same time, it provides publishers with precise control over online product definition, sales terms, merchandising and marketing.  This control can be exercised directly by non-technical people using web control panels. This allows for more experimentation as marketing and editorial staff can test product and marketing ideas and respond to market feedback quickly without IT developer support.

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The MIT Press CISnet is an addition to their regular web site. It is based on a paid subscription model. CISnet is designed for researchers who want to search and find specific content and may not want to read an entire book. As a former academic, this makes a lot of sense to me. You can search topics and go directly to a specific page of a book with the search term highlighted. You can then read the book page and explore other parts of the book. You can also copy and paste the page to a desktop application such as MS Word.  This is a great feature for the writer who wants to site a specific text. Since you can only do a page at a time, it is not practical for the person who wants to pirate the book.

Tizra is now rolling out a new tiered pricing plan that is oriented to a self-service approach, with self-service sign-ups.  The new product pricing ranges from free sites where they place ads, to fully customizable sites with no ads and complete commerce and branding control.  David took me to the administration interface to demonstrate the site creation and management process. Tizra makes it easy to sell online books and documents by the title, chapter or the page, or to collect, remix and sell pages in any combination.  You can implement a variety of sales terms, including pay per view, subscription access, multipacks, special discounts based on user group or discount code, and institutional access based on IP or login with variable concurrencies.  The branding is very flexible as you can see by comparing the MIT Press CISnet page above with the eat.shop page below.

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The eat.shop site provides shopping and dining guidance in multiple cities.  Their site describes them as “noted for their clean and modern design, luscious photography, witty travelogues and perfect throw in your bag size and they feature only locally owned businesses that are in the urban core. Most importantly, you don’t have to worry about slogging through a zillion listings – just 90 carefully chosen gems are featured by the author who does all of the research, writing and photography.” The Tizra based site shows them off very well.  There is a Boston book that I should look into. Below is a sample of the Tizra administration system.

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This is the MIT CISnet branded system but the Tizra administration system has same interface for all users. It allows you to set up title author, keywords, tags (invisible keywords like pub codes) that will facilitate search.  You can also have different types of key words such a geographical or topical. You can organize the site into collections and implement access control at this level. The collections are defined by query terms. You can easily reorganize the site into new collections. In addition, Tizra allows you to control content discoverability, selectively enabling Google and other search engines to index content behind the paywall. Below you can see the details associated with an individual book.

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You can also organize the site by offers with invitations to buy and associated business rules. The ease of use allows marketing people to experiment with different promotions without an IT person. The branding options start with templates for quick development, progresses to allowing for custom style sheets, and to full custom development for high-end subscribers. This is a drag and drop feature. Once you create a set of pages you like, you save them as a master block for reuse.

I see this service as a great tool for content sellers. It can also be a useful content distribution system for enterprises that need to mange the presentation of their information.  This will be especially useful for verticals with a lot of internal content such as legal firms, pharma, and other research oriented enterprises. The access control features will be helpful here. It can also be useful for firms who want to distribute marketing and technical content to customers and prospects but need to customize its organization or exert control over access. There is also a Tzira blog for more details on what they are doing.