I’d like to get in touch with these guys to discuss cross linking with Xerds.com, but their website http://www.minutedock.com just comes up with the words “It Works!” Both IE and Chrome.

We love the 37signals suite. Although most of the team are base in the same city, we have a few people we work with internationally and Basecamp , is ideal for sharing, project managing and keeping track of collaborative efforts.

I also recently came across Action Method , which although has the ability for collaboration, it’s predominantly used as a personal project management system.

Now I don’t know if these meet all the requirements that you specified, by here at yMedia “we’re firm believers in the power of collaboration” too, and these are just a couple of the tools we use to enable that.

Best,
JadE

Over the years, we’ve continued to evaluate Clouds as an option for delivering point services to our customers – but the economics havn’t justified a switch.

What is often overlooked by SaaS pundits is the fact that connecting to a Cloud very often reduces (sometimes eliminates) key features that a private SaaS vendor can provide. For example, we looked hard at augmenting our file storage with cloud storage via Amazon (and a few other vendors) but decided against it for two main reasons:

1. Vendor Economics. Yes, economics. The transactional access of files and data that our customers require as active collaborators was a very expensive alternative. Remember, we are talking about Terabytes and Terabytes of data that we host for our clients. Sure, Cloud storage/services are cost-effective for nascent startups trying to save money ( I get it…I really do), but onec you develop into a serious business with lots of paying customers and transactional needs, Cloud becomes more cost prohibitive than one might imagine.

2. Feature Reduction. Moving hot data to the Cloud resulted in slower performance and a reduction of features such as the inability to easily provide full-text search for documents stored in an offsite Cloud. The bar to provide certain features “in the cloud” was more expensive than it was for us to “do it ourselves.”

I agree that we shouldn’t be dogmatic, but the economics of cloud storage and delivery have been prohibitive to us and our customers for the reasons listed above.

As a pseudo-cloud pundit myself, I’d also argue that the “open platform” Cloud services promises customers is still hedged with the “single point of failures” that we continue to see in Cloud vendors (virtually all of them have experienced extended outages with their vendors left wondering “what is going on?”).

At least when we go down…..we know why, we are in control of the situation and we can fix it ourselves……and we can tell our customers what is happening/going on. Luckily, we don’t go down very often at all: http://status.centraldesktop.com

Will we someday surpass the ability to efficiently and cheaply deliver our SaaS’s to our customers on our private stack? Perhaps, but we’ve also found that our homegrown architecture enables lower cost of goods and is becoming more and more of a competitive advantage when we look at many of our competitors.

Long live profitability!