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In recent years, the rise of social media has forced suppliers intranet portal rethink some of its licensing models and expand feature functionality. "Traditional" intranet portals layers are simply presentations with a back-end system for content management not only highest court. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 features such as blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying so other messages from the top.

The collaborative efforts of the open source community were also new products on the market, bringing the cost of the software below and the injection of healthy competition in the industry portal. At the top of New features and pricing of new models of housing options and as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud hosting organizations to provide additional options to consider when building or upgrading their website. All of this spells opportunity for professionals who seek Intranet to make changes.

In the following sections of this four part article, we fail Some of the software and specific new platforms that are transforming the price tags portal, but before jumping to specific products, examine a recent example in the real world and how the climate has changed and how large the impact might be for a company.

In 2006 I was involved in a project Intranet for 500 telecommunications fortune with a employee base of approximately 25,000. After identifying the needs for the portal, find software appropriate led the project team to three real contenders: BEA Systems' Aqualogic Portal (now Oracle WebCenter), Sun Microsystems SunOne Portal (now defunct) and the thumbnail of the intranet portal (now part of OpenText). The three offered a personalized portal, system content management, search, emerging forums and blog / wiki functionality. However, each solution also requires the server hardware and resources are important purchased be spent on equipment maintenance and enforcement. After the final solution was selected and the appropriate equipment has been purchased, the pricetag for selected software and hardware was added to over 2 million dollars. Please note that the solution chosen was the least expensive of the three.

Now, Flash Forward to 2009. Recently I had lunch with the director present to resolve Intranet specific and he and I discussed changes in the industry and the merits of open source and hosted (SaaS) solutions. Knowing the price of the initial solution and the cost of annual software maintenance (20% of the cost of original software), took a little simple math to conclude that would take the annual maintenance of approximately $ 225,000 and easy to replace the current system to a hosted solution costs approximately $ 75,000.

With the cheapest solution is obtained:

1. A reduction of 37% of software costs ($ 200,000 to $ 75,000) in the first year.
2. A reduction of 93% of annual maintenance costs of software ($ 200,000 dropped to $ 15,000) in years.
3. Reduced hardware costs, allowing $ 200,000 in equipment to be reused in the workplace and off.
4. No count of workers required to maintain the equipment in order to reduce the overhead of employees.
5. SaaS Provider now is responsible for 99% uptime server (No more calls to break 3 hours in the morning when the server stops responding or a load balancer fails).
6. Continued evolution of the product and the annual purchase product updates from the vendor.
7. Web 2.0 Features offered by SaaS vendors is not offered by the incumbent.

So basically, this handler Intranet becomes more features its users a stable platform for him and his team awake at night, and a significant reduction in annual costs of a software made him a hero of the fight against companies and executives!

A second option that we discussed was looking at a lower cost software vendors or open source. In these situations, yet reduce their costs of annual software license significantly, but require yet the material and the number of employees is maintained. The return on investment, however, remains positive in a year due to the considerable reduction maintenance costs of software.

Obviously, the return on investment of this organization is magnified by the size and the wide range of software / hardware requirements for the company. However, it is likely that all of Intranet portals based on traditional software licensing model permanent or independent equipment could benefit from a review of the current system and an analysis of potential alternative technologies. Therefore, before cutting the next revision of software maintenance, take a moment to think how much they are paying and where you can get some extra bang for your money.

Check out part II of this series where we'll take a look at some of the existing replacement platforms that could positively impact your Intranet bottom line.

Sean R. Nicholson has been working with Web Development, Intranet portals, document management, and content management systems for more than 10 years. He has worked with large and small companies, including independent consulting firms, non-profit organizations, and Fortune 500 & 100 companies.

If you're interested in Intranets, check out great articles about portals, Enteprise Content Management, Internal Communications, and Social Media in the workplace at his blog at http://www.intranetexperience.com

Shared hosting that fall within the ranges of SaaS?

Some say no, there is nothing to say. What is your professional opinion? Could a shared hosting service, as provided by companies like GoDaddy fall in the ranking of SaaS? I say no, as clients or companies that need support for web services. Your opinion?

Yes, by definition, shared hosting is SaaS - Software as a Service (SaaS) is a model of implementation when the software application is hosted as a service to customers via the Internet. By eliminating the need install and run the application on the computer itself client, SaaS alleviates the customer's burden of software maintenance, operation and ongoing support. Using SaaS, they can reduce the initial cost to purchase software through cheaper prices on request. From the perspective of the supplier Software, SaaS has the advantage of providing greater protection of their intellectual property and establish a source of regular income. The SaaS software vendor in May host the application on your own Web server, or function may be handled by a third party service provider independent application (ASP). Thus, end users can reduce their investment in server hardware too.

Chapter 1: Intro: Zero to Zimbra in 20 Minutes