10 Tips for Working With Clients Remotely
Web Design Depot gives some advice on collaborating remotely, touching on everything from deadlines to contracts. “I’ve run into quite a few clients who don’t want to be bothered logging in to a new tool – they would rather flood your inbox with email after email after email. Trouble is, email does little to keep everyone on the same page. Unless you have a dedicated project manager, get yourself a web-based project management tool. Make to-do lists, set milestones, and keep discussions in a public space where you can easily point back to them.”

The Small-Biz Communication Breakdown
Fredric Paul Forbes lists business communication challenges and the price we pay for them, according to a Siemens study. “The study says 70% of SMBs have dealt with the top five pain points, translating into an average of 17.5 hours per week per knowledge worker into “unproductive” work time. This costs an average of $26,041 per knowledge worker per year, or $5,246 per employee per year.”

The Knowledge Worker and the Enterprise
Social Computing Magazine’s David Tebbutt expounds on Andrew McAfee’s ideas on Enterprise 2.0. “The strong tie group is unlikely to be the source of novel information or links to potential colleagues. They know each other too well. The weak ties are those most likely to lead us to new ideas and new opportunities. Enterprise 2.0 technologies don’t cause these things to happen, but they can act as amplifiers of these natural processes.”

Why Google Will Never Be Good At Enterprise Search
Brian Huff of Social Computing Magazine enumerates the fundamental differences of Internet search and enterprise search. “In order to truly solve the enterprise search problem, you need to first understand why people may choose to never use enterprise search, no matter how good it is… then try to bring them back into the fold with socially enabled enterprise search tools. Don’t just help people find information; help them find somebody who understands what the information means.”

Healthcare and Utilities Lead Vertical Markets in IT Spending
IT Jungle’s Dan Burger reports on current trends in IT markets. “Lovelock explained that the across-the-board trends show organizations deferring purchases such as servers and PCs and choosing to reduce internal services. But he is also seeing “a great deal of investment in business intelligence, business analytics, data warehousing.” Another identifiable trend is in the areas of software as a service, remote hosted software, and cloud computing, which are a break from traditional licensing methods and an attractive alternative to traditional software delivery models in that they are not so much capital investments as operational costs.”

Salesforce.com’s Growth Shows SaaS Success In Tough Economy
Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week attempts to explain why why SaaS sells, as well as its trouble spots. “Salesforce announced net income of $13.8 million for its fourth quarter ended Jan. 31, up from $7.4 million last year. Total revenue was $289.6 million for the quarter, an increase of 34% over last year’s fourth quarter. And despite a plunging economy that hit many IT budgets the hardest in late 2008, Salesforce increased its revenue by 5% over the preceding third quarter.”

The Struggle Over ‘Net Neutrality’
Carole Handler of Law.com offers up a comprehensive article on the issue, with some historical background and updates on its current status. “The legislative and judicial outcome of the current debate is impossible to predict. In an era in which government regulation of any element of the economy has been shied away from, and antitrust enforcement has been lax, the willingness of Congress to “regulate” a free Internet by prohibiting tiered pricing is uncertain indeed.”

In Software Architecture, Quality Equals Security
In TechNewsWorld, Dana Gardner features a panel discussion on enterprise architecture that suggests security considerations should be part of planning, not an afterthought. “Take Web 2.0 and SOA-style composite applications, for example. The problem with composite applications is that, as we’re building these composite applications, we don’t know the source of the widget. We don’t know whether these applications have been built with good secured design. In the long-term, that becomes problematic for the organizations that use them.”

Gartner Finds Most-Common SaaS Assumptions Are False
Antone Gonsalves from Intelligent Enterprise reports on Gartner’s findings about SaaS myths. “In applying a reality check on the leading assumptions, Gartner found the first to be true: SaaS is less expensive than on-premises software. Because SaaS applications do not require large capital investment for licenses or support infrastructure, they do carry a lower total cost ownership for the first two years. However, in the third year and beyond, an on-premises deployment can become less expensive from an accounting perspective as the capital assets used in the installation depreciate.”