dgildeh's blog

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 is too outdated to support all the latest advances in web application technology that SambaJAM provides.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.

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!)

A key part of using a collaboration platform like SambaJAM is having all your documents and content in one central place so that you and your team members can easily find what you're looking for across your projects and organisation. Because we understand the value of keeping the work (AKA knowledge) different projects and groups have generated for an organisation (sometimes referred to as Knowledge Management) our next focus when we designed SambaJAM was the search to ensure everyone can find what they're looking for easily and quickly.

As an enterprise product, we provide full text search so you can search both the properties (metadata) of your content and inside your content's text while also respecting the security of the content to ensure users only see what they're allowed to see.

We provide two search tools in our application - a quick search box to perform Google style searches, and an extremely new and intuitive advanced search interface to allow you to build complex search queries to drill down to exactly what you're looking for.

Quick Search

Along the top header of SambaJAM, you'll see search box in the top right corner to quickly search all the content across the spaces you belong to in SambaJAM. Using the dropdown on the right hand side, you can easily change the 'scope' of the search so you can limit your search to all the spaces you belong to, the current space you're working on, or to only search people if you're looking for someone's contact details.

Because this is a "quick" search, instead of the search sending you to another screen to view the results, and losing the current screen and work you're on, the results appear immediately in a dropdown below the search box - and as with all our content, we let you see the thumbnails of documents so you can quickly recognise documents visually.

If you know part of the word or phrase you're searching for, we also support "wildcard" searches so you can use a "*" to widen your searches. For example, if you know the document you're searching for starts with "IMG" but you can't remember the rest of the title, you can use "IMG*" to find all documents with "IMG" at the beginning of their name such as IMG_4685.jpg, IMG_4686.jpg etc. You can also restrict searches to a specific file type such as JPEG photos using "JPG" in the search box as below:

Advanced Search

If you've ever used an Advanced Search form before, you're probably bewildered with a number of complex options and fields required so you can build complex search queries to drill down to content deeper than you can using just keywords. We didn't like this approach as it requires the user to understand what each of the fields do and generally isn't the way people search.

When you search for something online, you tend to type in a specific keyword or term(s) to find what you're looking for. If that doesn't work, only then do you want to drill down further to build your complex search queries searching on things such as where the content is, when it was created, by whom, and whether its a document, wiki, event or another type of content. We've re-enforced this process with the Advanced Search page.

Search results are complemented by a list of filters you can use to narrow the search even further to specific content in spaces, content types or tags. By dragging these into the query box or clicking on them, the search results will instantly refresh to show you a narrower selection of results, which should make it easier to drill down to exactly what you're looking for!

With SambaJAM's search tools, you should never again be stuck looking for the information you need to complete your work, and searching should be a lot quicker and intuitive to do than other systems you've used in the past!

Sign up for our private beta today to have a go yourself and let us know what you think!

For years, we've been working in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) space delivering large document management systems and collaboration portals for banks, global companies and NGOs. All of them used huge and complex systems such as FileNet, Documentum and (less huge but still complex) Microsoft SharePoint. And for years we never understood why it was so hard to manage documents using their clunky web interfaces.

For example, in SharePoint, a great product in manay regards which is why its become Microsoft's fastest growing product ever and used by loads of companies around the world for collaboration and document management, you get something that looks like this to manage your documents:

Its essentially a list of documents on a web page, if you click the arrow next to each document, you get a list of options you can do on that document, clicking one of the options opens a new window with a clunky form to edit or fill in. And SharePoint is one of the easier ones to deal with!

If you look at many of the start-ups in this space you’d think all of them would be taking advantage of the latest in web2.0/AJAX technology to improve on this web-page list concept, but you’d be mistaken. Just take a look, while the lists look nicer, they all still provide the same thing, a list of documents on a web-page which clicking on takes you to another page with all the document properties and forms to edit them, not really much of an improvement.

So when we came to design the document library for SambaJAM we looked for inspiration from what is undeniably the best tool to manage your documents - your desktop! By using the latest in web2.0/AJAX technology we set out to create a very intuitive, familiar experience for our end users to manage documents in their web browser. Some of the key features that were important to us during the design:

• Thumbnailing: Just like your desktop, isn't it much nicer to actually see visually the files your looking at. You may not remember the file name, but you may remember the front page had a bright orange logo. We've ensured all our documents are thumbnailed so you can easily browse through documents. However, if you do just want to go back to a list of documents (detailed view) you can simply switch views and do that too!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Drag and drop Documents: With many users and document controllers spending a lot of their time simply organising the documents everyone else has uploaded into the correct folders so they're properly organised and easy to find, we decided the easiest way to move documents around was simply to select the ones you wanted to move, and drag them to the folder you wanted to move them too. Not only that, but like Windows, you can also drag documents and files into the folder tree on the left hand menu.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Context Menus: Like your desktop, you can get access to all the actions you're allowed to perform on a document simply by clicking your right mouse button. All of the actions will bring up a popup form instead of re-directing you to another page so you can quickly do what you need to do and return back to the folder you're working on.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Tagging: Sometimes, documents don’t also make sense organised into specific folders. That’s where tagging comes in, you can tag different types of documents like ‘proposals’ or ‘reports’ with specific tags and using the tag tree menu on the left hand menu, easily show all the ‘proposals’ or ‘reports’ in the document library regardless of which folder they’re in.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Filters: Sometimes you just want to see the latest modified documents, the documents other people are currently working on or just the ones you're currently working on. By using the filter menu you can quickly filter all the documents to what you want to see.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Online Previews: Sometimes you just want to read a document, or quickly open it to see if its what you're looking for before you download it. Sometimes you can’t download it because the document was written in Microsoft Office 2007 and you only have Office 2003. That’s where online previews come in. By double clicking a document, you can open another tab in your space to view the document (so you can still easily flick back to your folders if needed) and read the document online. If you upload rich media such as audio (and in future Video) you can also listen/watch those online as well!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Versioning: The only way to ensure you're all working off the same version, and that no one's changes are lost is version control. We allow you to easily check-in and check-out documents to make your changes so every time you save a new copy, the previous versions are still accessible and can be rolled back to at anytime if someone made a mistake.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Commenting: Easily write comments against your documents instead of emailing your comments back and forth!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Uploading: Nearly every system I've ever seen requires you to go to a separate page to upload your files, and generally its one file at a time, during which you can't get on with anything else. We've decided that if you're uploading loads of files, especially large files which take time to upload, you should be able to simply queue them up, and then minimise the window to the footer so you can continue with your work and get notified when the uploads are finished. When I first used SambaJAM I uploaded several hundred files, and it had absolutely no impact on the rest of my work, I simply minimised it and got on with other things on SambaJAM!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Online Editing: We've integrated with Zoho so you can create and edit your word documents, spreadsheets and presentations online without leaving your web browser! Not only does this save you having to download the file and re-upload just to make a quick change, in the future you'll be able to collaboratively edit the document with your colleagues in real time!
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Workflows: Workflows allow you to send documents for review or assign quick tasks like 'Update the logo on the front page' to other users without using email. By initiating a workflow for your document, you not only generate tasks for the people you want involved to see in their Tasks inbox on their Dashboard, you can also see the progress of how far along the review process the document is.
  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
• Microsoft Windows, Office and Email Integration: I'm getting ahead of myself here but we don't believe you should actually have to log into SambaJAM to create and edit documents stored there. Wouldn't it be great if you could edit your documents in Microsoft Office and using its built in functionality, save it back to SambaJAM directly? Or map SambaJAM as a network drive to manage your documents in Windows explorer? Or map SambaJAM as an email account in Outlook so you can simply drag email attachments into SambaJAM? Or simply email a document into SambaJAM without logging in? That’s a few of the things that will be coming in later on so watch this space!

And not only ALL of the above, but all your documents are stored on an Enterprise Content Management system used by Fortune 500 companies around the world so you get enterprise class security, scalability, customisation and all the other features you'd expect from a system of this type!

Pretty awesome eh? In-fact something I heard the other day that made me laugh, but I should put as a disclaimer:

IF YOU'RE ALLERGIC TO AWESOMENESS - PLEASE DO NOT USE SAMBAJAM!!!

You have been warned... ;)

Today Google announced their new Google Chrome OS here. This is a very interesting development and something many were predicting when Google launched Chrome last year.

For those of you who aren't one of the apparent 30 million users using Google Chrome, its a new web browser from Google. Why do we need another web browser when we already have Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and a hundred other browsers? Well Google noticed that many web browsers just aren't designed for rich internet applications like we build in SambaStream. A lot of new applications are written in JavaScript and use AJAX technology, which makes for extremely user friendly user interfaces that look and feel like your local desktop applications, but don't require any installation (saving IT departments huge headaches when rolling out a new application across large organisations) and run anywhere simply through your web browser. The problem with current web browsers is they run JavaScript pretty slowly, and unfortunately if one JavaScript application crashes, it will crash your entire browser. They don't also provide all the capabilities required out of the box (although they're heading there) for offline browsing, and slim interfaces that don't interfere with the web application's interface and available space to display them.

So Google created a new open-source web browser called Chrome to address these issues. Because we build our own applications at SambaStream on Google Web Toolkit, which essentially allows us to provide rich and fast JavaScript/AJAX applications for users, Chrome is great! Not only do our applications run faster, we can (in future) make them work offline (useful if you're on an airplane and have no internet but still want to use your applications) and also if another application crashes (because ours would never do such a thing!) it won't shut down the whole web browser and lose all your work. It also allows us to provide simple desktop icons so you can launch and use our applications just as you would a normal desktop application.

This is the future of how applications will be delivered. Through a web browser, with no installation required, just sign-up and point your web browser to use it, and all your data will be securely stored, backed up and accessible anywhere in the world. Not only does it save money, it opens up the whole way we work allowing you to do so much more than you could on you current desktop.

However, even Chrome is just a web browser, and needs to be run on top of another operating system such as Windows, MacOS or Linux, so while you can use your web applications on your browser, you still have to switch back to your local desktop applications, look after your data and manage your local applications, upgrading and patching them regularly as new updates become available. Now Google has announced the beginning of a new class of operating system (OS) - essentially all the OS does is load the computer, the browser will now become your user interface on which you will run all your applications, browse the internet and communicate. And better yet its open-source (also known as free to the rest of us!)

So why is this such a big deal? As we're a business software organisation I want to give the example of what small and medium size businesses currently do (the potential benefits and cost savings are FAR greater for large global enterprises but I'll leave them out for now).

Imagine this - right now you buy pretty expensive PCs, you install them locally, buy some servers to run your email and other applications, put them somewhere secure in your office, hire an experienced IT guy to run and manage them if you can afford, or if you can't, hire an IT support firm that will come in to fix your PCs and servers if needed, and generally that's quite a lot of the time. The fact is your current PCs and Servers run very complicated operating systems and software (such as email servers for your email). Complication = Complexity = more chance of something going wrong. On top of that, you manage all your data locally, if you're not experienced enough, you may have a security hole you're not aware of, if you forget to backup you could lose all your data...the cost of managing your data properly is actually very expensive, and the more security and redundancy you have the more expensive it becomes.

Now imagine the future - you buy a very cheap "thin-client" PC, which essentially has a screen, a keyboard and some memory. You switch it on, instead of waiting a few minutes for your PC to start-up, it starts almost instantly, because the fact is the operating system does nothing more than start your web browser. Its light, simple and as a result less likely to crash and have problems. You've just saved a lot of support calls and money. Secondly, the server can now go, because all your applications such as email, Microsoft Office tools, accounting systems, CRM etc. are hosted securely by SaaS vendors like SambaStream. The vendor provides the online software through your web browser, looks and feels like a local desktop application, but because the vendor provides it as a service, they take care of all the security, data backups and updates to the system. You now don't need an IT guy to support it anymore.

This is the vision we have at SambaStream, to provide enterprise-class applications for organisations of all sizes that need little more than a web browser and a simple monthly subscription to run. One day businesses won't need to pay lots of money to setup their IT systems. Just pay a monthly subscription, and get support for each application from the experts, the people who actually built the application in the first place and will be able to fix it faster than an IT guy who has to manage several applications and probably isn't an expert in any of them.

I personally don't think Google Chrome OS will have a huge impact anytime soon, Windows has become an institution for many people and I believe many businesses will take time to change the current mindset to move away from their current applications and way of working, but its a start and I'm sure within the next decade we will see a significant shift towards the vision I described, in fact I bet our company on it!