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The Problems and Challenges with Software as a Service

Posted on 09 April 2008 by


I write for a couple of different sites. Including this one, I write or have written for CompuServe/AOL, Pocket PC Thoughts, Lockergnome, The Gadgeteer, CMPNet’s File Mine, WUGNET: The Windows User’s Group Network, and Gear Diary. Honestly, life is all sunshine and daisies when the site is up and your backup app is working.  However, when things go south, and you find out that your data is gone due to some sort of corruption or backup problem, life can get very complicated.

Gear Diary had a problem like this not too long ago, if you remember.  Judie, the site owner, ran around like a nut trying to work with the hosting company to get things turned around.  Some things went well, but others did not, and we had to rebuild the site from scratch.

Gear Diary is a WordPress enabled site, so many team members use the online WYSIWYG editor to create and edit content. It saves drafts, allows you to upload (and even watermark) graphics/pictures, and is, for all intent and purposes, an online word processor, much like Google Docs.  When the site went belly up, most of the content headed south the border as well.  Most team members had not saved a local copy of their work…which got me thinking…

One of the biggest and hottest trends I’ve been hearing a lot about lately is software as a service, a la Google Docs, Office Live, etc. If you take the Gear Diary site issue as a point of reference, and apply software as a service (which is basically what WordPress is acting as), you get an interesting and fairly destructive situation.  WordPress doesn’t offer any kind of method of saving its documents locally, or in a format that can be read (or edited) by any other local application. Despite the fact that WordPress creates HTML documents, all data stays on the server.

If you bump into a server issue, i.e. you go down, your data gets lost. It happened to Gear Diary. It can happen to any user that uses a software as a service app. what bothers me more, is that unless there’s a specific viewer or offline editing tool for the document type, the data is useless.  Further, if the app doesn’t allow you to save data locally, an off line viewer isn’t going to do much good anyway.

Many users here (those that work right on the server) have taken to copying the code out of WordPress and saving it as a text or HTML file. That at least gets the data out and saved to your local hard drive.  However, it doesn’t address disaster recovery on the client side (which was one of the big draws, aside from cost savings and the lack of deployment problems…all you need in most cases is a compatible browser…).

Interestingly enough, Google may be planning changes to their online suite that would allow users to do just this: save data locally. As I noted above, the ability to save data to the server is nice, but if you’re on a laptop and not connected to the ‘Net, you might be out of luck if you’ve got work to do.

If Google Docs users have downloaded Google Gears, they should be able to edit a copy of a locally stored or cached version of the data, when they open a browser, and “navigate” to docs.google.com. Users will be able to transfer the updated data back to the server when the computer goes back on line, which is huge; but I don’t necessarily want to rely on data that’s still in my Internet cache.  The browser needs to save the file locally…and it would be nice to have it saved in an industry standard format.

I’d love to hear everyone’s opinion on this.  Why don’t you join us in the discussion area and give us your thoughts?  I just have one request…I’d like us to NOT get into a debate over software as a service vs. a client side app, if possible.  I’d like to hear everyone’s thoughts and ideas on getting past the problems and challenges I’ve outlined: saving data locally and to a server, local file viewing and editing and disaster recovery; but if we MUST debate the entire issue, that’s cool too!

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  • http://www.magnusson.ca Chris Magnusson

    In addition to my comment on the SimpleTech Signature Mini USB 2.0 Portable Drive Review yesterday, I duplicate anything I post online to a folder within My Documents or My Pictures. So that gets backed up six times as well. :twisted:

  • Joel Mclaughlin

    I think the most important thing that the online service can do is to let you get your data. For example, for wordpress, I would see if you can add a button to the editor that spits out a HTML file and images or something like that. Make it easy to pull the stuff out of the editor.

  • alese

    It’s funny that this is becoming a problem, since I allways thought that one of primary benefits of going with the online services is the “built in” security.
    Basically if I use Google docs or Gmail, Google is taking care of the backups, so that my data is safe.
    I guess I’ll have to rethink my idea of having my mails “in the cloud” and that backups are taken care of…

  • Wayne Schulz

    A similar argument could have (and probably was) made when things moved from pencil and paper to computer. Heck I still have clients that argue along the lines of “not trusting the computer”.

    Part of this argument confuses me because you’re talking about online web hosts and (I think) making comparisons to Google Apps (et al). Are these really in the same league?

    An online host (in their mind) is essentially renting hard disk space and bandwidth.

    SAAS like Google Apps, are usually providing the entire package of use and storage – bundled in a do it yourself package. These SAAS usually take some responsibility for data privacy and backup.

    I’m really confused how we discuss this issue without discussing SAAS. Isn’t that what the entire story is about?

  • http://GearDiary Christopher Spera

    Wayne,

    I am not talking about web hosts at all. From an end user perspective, it doesn’t make a difference if a server glitch is caused by a web host or a software service provider. Your data is in the cloud, and not on your local PC. If the cloud evaporates (for a while, like you’re on a laptop and don’t have access to any kind of connectivity) you can’t get to your data. If the service or site goes down, you can’t get to your data.

    While software as a service might represent a licensing savings, might be a better way of completing enterprise deployments, might help to save the planet (no more plastic media..?), without a way to save and/or view/edit locally, my data is held hostage until I can get back to the cloud.

  • Peter

    I think that it depends on the SaaS provider. Some of them, especially the sites that are “for pay”, do provide export functions or offer an export if you work through the helpdesk system. The free ones typically offer the bare minimum. You use the software and if you get extra capabilities for backup, that’s a bonus.

    I would argue that if you pay some monthly fee you should get backup/restore through a ticket and the ability to export/save locally as needed.

    I can see the pros and cons of both sides. SaaS lets you work through a browser with no (or little) trouble. However you’re at the mercy of the provider. Working through client apps means you can access without being online, but are limited to workstations with the necessary software. You also need to provide your own backups.