On the Mark: Share Excel files SaaS style
December 03, 2007 (Computerworld) -- To say, as George Langan does, that “companies run on Excel” is only a slight exaggeration. But working with Excel is generally a solitary process. If people want to share their work, they send e-mail attachments, which is not a particularly secure practice. Langan, who’s the CEO of eXpresso Corp. in Menlo Park, Calif., wants to make working on Excel spreadsheets a secure and auditable collaborative process. Later this month, the company plans to take its eXpresso software-as-a-service offering out of beta and begin charging $80 per year per seat for the Professional version. (The company is also releasing Open eXpresso, a free, feature-reduced version, and it says an enterprise appliance is slated for Q1 2008.) Also, eXpresso has created a clever way to share spreadsheets online. According to Langan, when an Excel file is uploaded to the eXpresso site, the service turns it into a binary large object, or BLOB, which can then be broken into the columns and rows of a relational database. Although everyone continues to work in Excel, changes are made in the database. Multiple people can work on the same spreadsheet in real time, says Langan. You can set a “safe point” in the service so you can always roll back to a known good file. The system can grant users various levels of access to a document, determining who can, say, read it, revise it or print it. During the collaboration process, instant messages are saved in a searchable data store. Sure beats sending Excel files here, there and everywhere. Autonomic for the People Most vendors target their autonomic management tools at the IT operations staff. That’s a mistake, contends Bruce Olson, vice president of strategy and business development at Optinuity Inc. in Bethesda, Md. He says the best place to monitor for autonomic purposes is at the application level, which is what your users care about anyway, not metrics about packet retransmission rates. Today, Optinuity is announcing its Oasis tool, which helps app dev teams build in autonomic support for their software. The Oasis visual user interface lets developers “create complex effects that are not complex to write,” says Chief Technology Officer Rachid Sijelmassi. These effects are what Olson calls an “action plan” about, say, how to alert a SAN administrator that an application needs more storage. He adds that having the app writers create the metrics is likely to result in fewer alerts. Pricing varies by implementation. 'Rip' a Searchable Index From Backup A 2005 survey by Fulbright & Jaworski LLP estimated that the average $1 billion company had 140 lawsuits pending against it. And with the advent last year of new electronic-discovery regulations, your company’s legal team has probably already asked you for some help in finding old e-mails, files and the like. In fact, Jim McGann, vice president of marketing at Index Engines Inc., a vendor of discovery tools in Holmdel, N.J., claims that some firms are “getting litigation-ready” by locating and categorizing files in anticipation of courtroom action. In other words, e-discovery has become another pressure point on IT. Index Engines eDiscovery Appliance v2.5, available now, can help, says McGann, noting that it can index one of your more difficult data repositories — tape backup. He says Index Engines can decipher five different backup software formats and “rip” an index of everything stored. Pricing starts at $50,000.