Some welcome news today, Google has decided to not support Internet Explorer 6 anymore with two of its core products, Google Docs and Sites (read about it on BBC news).

As Clarence mentioned in his blog, we have also taken the decision not to support IE6. We've found that IE6 (which is almost 10 years old now!) is too outdated to support all the latest advances in web application technology that SambaJAM provides. Instead of downgrading the experience for the end user for the sake of a dying browser, we decided to not support IE6. While on the general web this is an not an issue as many users have upgraded, as the BBC article highlights, there is still a large userbase of enterprise users who are forced to keep using IE6, and as an enterprise company this is something we are constantly aware of.

With Googles support, and increasing numbers of vendors deciding not to support IE6 anymore because of its limitations, we hope to see IE6 phased out sooner than Microsoft's 2014 end-of-support date. The web has moved on, and enterprises will come under increasing pressure to phase out IE6 if they wish to give the latest and greatest web applications like SambaJAM to their users.

Yesterday the big news was the UK economy grew a WHOLE 0.1% last quarter! This means the official end of the worst recession in peace time history, although there are many warnings that we're not completely out of the woods yet.

So does that mean we'll be returning to business as usual? Of course not! Recessions bring change, and while businesses will hopefully start to grow again, some long term trends have been accelerated by the recession and will start to become very obvious from 2010 onwards:

• Remote working - Offices have become increasingly mobile over the past decade, but with businesses looking to save operating costs on office space during the recession, even more businesses are starting to encourage home working for their staff. Forrester predicts that in the next 5 years, 43% of staff will be telecommuting regularly.
• Knowledge Management - With the number of layoffs we've had during this recession, a lot of businesses are starting to really appreciate the impact of lost knowledge after the staff walks out the door. You may be missing documents they created during their work, lost forever in their email inboxes or private folders/computers, or actual procedures and instructions that could have easily been captured in a wiki. Businesses will increasingly appreciate the value of the information and knowledge their staff have and look for tools and procedures to ensure they manage and retain this knowledge in the organisation.
• Doing more with less - Some companies have been hit hard by redundancies, and the remaining staff have found they have more work on their plate, which will only grow again as the economy recovers. Companies have needed to drive through productivity tools to enable a smaller workforce to do more. As the workload increases again, companies will look first to productivity improvements before hiring a large workforce again.
• Cutting back operating costs - One of the biggest winners during the recession was cloud computing. For those of you unfamiliar with cloud computing, essentially the software vendor provides the software over the internet for a monthly subscription. No more upfront capital costs to buy licenses and servers to run it, no need to hire specialist IT guys to keep the system running and backed up. The huge cost savings this allows have allowed some businesses to cut down their IT costs dramatically over the past year, and this is one of those trends where once you start, you don't go back! Expect more and more businesses to take advantage of cloud computing from now on.

We're entering a brave new world. Businesses will tread carefully towards recovery, but with a new appreciation of some of the trends that have appeared this decade. They will increasingly start to see how these trends can really help them save operating costs and help their workforce become more flexible and agile to respond to future opportunities and threats. Expect to see cloud computing vendors like SambaStream become more pervasive in the enterprise and enterprise collaboration tools like SambaJAM become a standard way of working and helping businesses manage their core asset - knowledge. We feel very confident as we enter the new economy, I hope you do too!

If you'd like to learn more about how SambaJAM can address the trends discussed in this blog for your business, please contact us here.

With the cold weather thawing now, the first few weeks of this month saw the UK snowed under for several days with up to 20% of the work force staying at home during the "snow days". The Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) predicted that this cost the British Economy approximately £900 million for each snow day we suffered.

The lost productivity from snow days leads to problems for both you and your staff:

• Drop in revenue - If you can't work or deliver services to your customers on snow days, you could stand to see your revenue drop significantly on those days
• Delayed payments - If your customers are also suffering from snow days, you could find payments from customers disrupted, and the interruption in your cash flow hitting your business
• Missed deadlines and targets - If your business is working to tight deadlines and targets, you could find snow days have a dramatic impact on your staff's productivity, meaning you have to adjust your original deadlines and targets further in the future. If you have service level agreements with customers, you could also find yourself hit with penalties if there is a significant slip in deadlines and targets.
• Increase in work backlog - With people ramping up to full speed after the Christmas holidays, we noticed that "business as usual" didn't start properly until this week of the (18th January onwards), a full 2 weeks after the new year! This was mainly due to the disruption of snow and now means staff and businesses find themselves with a much bigger backlog of work to catch-up after the Christmas holidays.

Unfortunately businesses can't control the weather, but what they can control is ensuring their staff has access to the information and tools they need to get on with their work regardless of where they're located.

With collaboration software like SambaJAM, staff can stay connected virtually over the web, without any loss of access to the key information and tools they use everyday in the office. For example:

• If you currently keep all your documents on your office desktops or shared network drives, most likely your staff will lose access to those outside the office. With web based collaboration software, not only can you ensure your staff still have access to the documents, you can also ensure they can search and edit documents easily. All they need is a web browser, and with online editing tools like Zoho, they don’t even need expensive Microsoft Office installed on their home PC or laptop to continue working.
• By using task management, you can still action and assign tasks to your team, even if you’re all sitting in different locations. This helps you keep things on track during the disruption.
• If you have all your information inside the collaboration platform, you can still search for the information and documents you need to complete your work without any disruption
• If you need your colleagues contact details, the profile pages can act as a replacement for your internal corporate directory, so staff can still get in touch with everyone from home
• You can use the social networking tools to keep your team connected and talking even if they’re sitting miles apart. They can post questions, ideas, issues as though its business as usual. Like a virtual office conversation on the web.

For your staff, the great thing about collaboration tools like SambaJAM, is if they use them day to day in the office, moving to another location will be seamless. All their information, documents and tools will still be there in the same place they left them, and as long as they have a browser to access them, you can ensure they don’t let the backlog of work after Christmas build up on snow days, making for a more relaxed return to work for both them and you.

If your business suffered as a result of the recent weather and you’d like to see how collaboration tools like SambaJAM can support remote working, please contact us here.

Wow. I have always wanted to have my Adam Garcia moment and be an Iron Man at the La Honda Institute like in the hilarious movie "The first $20 Million is always the hardest". Looks like the invention of the $99 computer is just around the corner. My dearest mother in-law, who I have just discovered is web 2.0, sent me a link to a very interesting talk by Pranav Mistry inventor of SixthSense. Watch the clip below to see the possibilities of Pranav's invention... uses a Sony type eyecam object recognition and a mini projector to turn your panaroma and any surface into an interactive environment, I am sure a hologram version is just around the corner. May be Amazon and Sony should pack up the ebook readers and come out with some headered paper instead for the SixthSense device. It gives a whole new meaning to OLED

The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest

SixthSenses $300 Computer

Gary Hustwit has produced an interesting documentary about the relationship behind design of our everyday objects and the people who create them. We deliberate emphatically about the design of SambaJAM so that it works for our users and it is inspiring to listen to the designers in the documentary discuss their own ideas and design principles.

Watching the documentary I reflected on our own challenges to make SambaJAM have broad appeal and deliver its purpose. We aim to make SambaJAM intuitive and productive to use. We want to make using a web application a rewarding experience as users interact with our system to carry out their everyday work.

Our design challenges balance what’s possible now, with performance, yet we continually strive to push out the best even when faced with hurdles of code and problems to solve, its what we love doing.

In the documentary Dieter Rams provides a great sound bite regarding the things that design should be, noted as the ten commandments of design.

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long lasting
8. Good design is thorough, down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible

From one designer to another. The Royal Academy of Arts is hosting Anish Kapoor exhibition in London. His creations have overwhelming appeal for people. This is a guy who seems to know, naturally, what people enjoy visually experiencing. If there was a designer we wish to reflect in capturing engagement and openess of SambaJAM it would be him.

Sorry to everyone waiting for this the past week since I presented it a Minibar, with the exhibition this has been the first chance I've had to catch up and upload this!

For those of you who weren't there, November's Minibar focused on using Open Source for web applications, and here at SambaStream, we LOVE Open Source. For the techies among you, you can see what our Open Source stack looks like, and how we've used it to build SambaJAM in months as opposed to the years it would have taken us had we not used Open Source. There's also some tips on our experiance working with commercial Open Source vendors like Alfresco.

SambaStream Minibar Presentation - Using Open Source in SaaS

View more documents from Samba Team.

Hi everyone, just wanted to give a quick update on the exhibition we've been attending the last couple of days, IMS 2009. We've had an excellent 2 days meeting loads of interesting people and companies, and fortunately getting a lot of positive feedback and interest in SambaJAM! Here's a blurry picture from my iPhone of our stand below - credit on graphics goes to Clarence, who did an excellent job with our banners!

Also, today I was interviewed for China's largest TV news network, talking about SambaJAM and our experience at IMS. I'll post a link to the story when its available, but apparently my face and our product will be going out across China to millions of people in the next few hours! Fortunately Zhijun had already prepared a logo for SambaJAM in Mandarin, so we had that in the background too! Check it out below...looks like we'll have to go sell in China next!

So if you're free tomorrow, make sure you get your ticket and visit us at Stand 283 before its over!

London - Working in the cloud has never been more exciting. SambaStream, the newest company to ascend into the cloud, will be revealing SambaJAM, the first extensible collaborative content management platform in the cloud, at the IMS 2009 Exhibition. The exhibition takes place at the London Olympia from 1st to 3rd December and this will be the first chance for visitors to see the future of cloud content management.

With businesses increasingly working with distributed teams and external partners, the demand for secured information sharing services has never been greater. SambaJAM provides secure workspaces that allow teams to collaboratively create and share content such as documents, rich media, wikis and calendars. Built on a powerful Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform, SambaJAM brings together rich Web2.0 collaboration tools and social networking on top of a powerful, extendable ECM platform.

The three founders of the venture worked in Accenture Information Management Solutions as experts in collaboration software before pursuing SambaStream. “We were delivering complex and expensive collaboration solutions for clients that weren’t getting the adoption rates and ROIs promised,” states co-founder David Gildeh, “we took the lessons learned and produced SambaJAM. No more complex roll-outs and an AJAX user interface that ensures users easily pick up the application and actually save time using it”.

So what makes SambaJAM so different from all the other cloud start-ups fighting for a stake in the collaboration market? “You can build bespoke custom solutions on top of SambaJAM exactly the same way as an on-premise solution” says co-founder Alessandro Giannone. “Customers get the rapid deployment and cost savings of using a cloud solution, without losing the extensibility and customization of an on-premise solution”.

This would allow customers to quickly roll out SambaJAM for immediate business benefits, but easily extend the platform as their business requires to provide a powerful alternative to more expensive and complex solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint.

After a year of passion, ingenuity and commitment, the three entrepreneurs are ready to create a storm in the clouds. As co-founder Clarence Sittampalam says “We hope to become the SalesForce.com of ECM in the cloud. The market is rapidly maturing and we are poised to capitalize on this with SambaJAM.”

SambaStream will be located at stand 283 at the IMS 2009 exhibition in London Olympia. To learn more about SambaJAM, please visit www.sambajam.com or contact us.

We've just reserved our place (very last minute) to exhibit SambaJAM at the Online Information Exhibition 2009 in London this December in 19 days!!!

We'll be there for the 3 days demoing SambaJAM and letting the 9500 people expected to attend understand just why SambaJAM is the future of online collaboration (if it wasn't obvious already?!). You'll find us in the Content Management area on Stand 283 near the Seminar Theatres so make sure you make your way over to come see us and give us some support!

If you're interested in coming you can register for free here in about 2 minutes. It should be a great exhibition only enhanced by our Samba Girls*!

* Subject to us actually finding the girls and Samba costumes we need in time - watch this space (or let us know if you can help!)