Tasos Christidis

In the previous post we saw what makes a SaaS space, a “community”: It’s a collection of people with similar business competencies and/or similar everyday issues pertinent to the SaaS application that they are using. We also discussed that it is only in the SaaS world that these users have the technical capability to instantly interact (in any other application community, they would have to meet each other in separate blogs, forums etc.) Today, we shall give some practical ideas of how this community could interact and share and the topics of that conversation. Implement “user group news”: The SaaS desktop could provide a special space where news and alerts regarding the application would be released or communicated, for all users to read through. For example, new functionality that was added, explanations about a recent slowdown event, new pricing policies on behalf of the vendor are just some examples of what the “user group news” could be about. The easiest way to do this, outside ...

Any SaaS service is the gathering space or meeting point of a large (hopefully!) number of users. Depending on the scope of the application, these users may belong to similar business spaces/ventures/competencies or not. Even if they don’t, they share at least some kind of appreciation for the benefits of SaaS (such as lowering actual costs, real time access from anywhere etc.). One more aspect in what these users are sharing is the everyday issues that they face with the usage of the application. Known bugs, common functionality enhancements, user interface issues etc. Who is better equipped to help you, than your co-user in the same SaaS space? Yes, you would expect that the application is equipped with some on-line help or perhaps a written user’s manual. But, SaaS applications are moving at the edge of technology and functional updates and upgrades are being done very often; much too often for a written document to keep up. Keeping a written user’s manual up-to-date is very hard a...