David Kluskiewicz

There’s an array of free and inexpensive hosted productivity software that can help you get your work done. Much of it is collaboration software that allows you to create documents that are editable and trackable by multiple people. (Handy for any group project.) With the cost of storage and processing dropping, it’s feasible that you could run most business functions with a handful of these tools. Unfortunately, if it’s hosted by someone else, you run the risk of losing access for an unknown period of time.

The lessons learned by this partner of JotSpot (recently acquired by Google) should be applied to the use of any hosted productivity software. Wikis, blogs, on-line storage – any one of them could get eaten up by Google tomorrow. This doesn’t mean they are too risky. For their cost and their efficiency they are often superior to anything pushed by the major vendors. What it means is that we should seriously consider taking one extra step to assemble and run these applications on our own servers.