Rise of the web-based application provider

I’m starting to get into application providers. I used to be in the “grow it your own” camp, but lately I’ve had a lot of good results with:

• www.salesforce.com
  • “sales force management”
  • better than GoldMine or ACT
• 123signup.com
  • membership management
  • moving my non-profits to it; suddenly we get on-line registration and membership management; and backups and stuff
• (various web hosting services)
  • web hosting
  • $10-$20/month and I can’t believe what a relief it is to not be doing it myself
• capwiz.com
  • letters to congress and other features
  • they maintain the database and my tiny non-profit looks like a huge lobbying firm
• yahoogroups.com
  • mailing list, file repository

Now I just need someone else to do the following:

• Capacity monitoring (like Cricket)
• Trouble ticketing (like RT)
• Up/down monitoring (like Nagios/Bigbrother/something better)
• Shared document (like Twiki)
• Spam fighting

and I can put myself out of business.

Did I mention...

Checklist for status summaries

Today I made a PowerPoint slide for my boss to use at the next leadership meeting. It needed to list the accomplishments of the IT department for the last quarter. After going through old emails and logs I had a pretty good list. However, I then went though the list of everyone on the leadership team and thought about what was important to them, and made sure that at least one thing on the list related to their priorities. That reminded me of some projects that I had completed but forgot to list.

I then created a slide called “plans for next quarter” and repeated the process, first listing the projects that were on my agenda and then making sure that each person on the leadership team could point at one of them and say, “ah, he’s keeping my requests in mind.”

For each item I asked myself, “Who would sponsor this item?” That helped me figure out how to rephrase some of the items more succinctly. I could focus better since I was thinking, “How would I explain this to the sponsor” or “how did the sponsor request that item?” A very long description of LAN problems in a certain building was shortened to be “Fix {the issue as the sponsor described}”, which will be much more understandable than trying to explain about Ethernet topology issues and their effect on reliability.

I have a difficult time removing things from a list to make it shorter, and these lists were growing a little larger than one should put on a powerpoint slide. It dawned on me that if I can’t decide what to remove, I could check to see which items had no sponsors. It’s interesting to point out that I never actually removed any items. Rephrasing things more succinctly saving enough room that I didn’t have to.