It has been over three years since the NetDocuments/Salesforce.com integration was developed and listed on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Over that time, NetDocuments and Salesforce have built a strong base of joint customers that are leveraging the power of SaaS to handle their CRM and content management needs.

There are currently 811 apps listed on the AppExchange and the NetDocuments app continues to be one of the most popular and highly rated:

There are numerous benefits inherent with SaaS applications and we have discussed many of them on this blog: anywhere access, low startup costs, automatic upgrades, etc. We've always known that the SaaS apps are more environmentally friendly than on-premise software, but have not taken the time to quantify and prove this.

In September, Chris Thorman of Softwareadvice.com released a study regarding the environmental impact of SaaS applications in his blog post titled, "SaaS v. On-premise Software: Which One is More Green." The post garnered a lot of buzz and sparked a healthy debate on the topic.

Kevin Dobbs from Montclair Advisors writes a very informative blog titled, "Smart SaaS." Over the past year he has been highlighting different SaaS companies in his "SaaS Business Profile" series. This week he featured NetDocuments, and interviewed its CEO Ken Duncan to get content for the article.

When asked about emerging trends in the SaaS industry, Ken Duncan touched on the benefit of SaaS for SMB's:

As a SaaS company, we understand that rather than providing our customers with a product, we are offering a service. Because of this business model, our customers act more as partners in the business rather than just customers. They do this by interacting with our team and providing feedback and suggestions to improve our service. In appreciation to our "partners," we created two videos expressing our gratitude.

This past week saw a wide variety of news, blogs and videos regarding SaaS content management and cloud computing all over the web. In this blog, we will highlight a few of them.

In August, during Ilta '09, A group from ii3 consultants produced live Ilta TV broadcasts of conference events and interviews. They have now posted the recordings of the broadcasts online and made them free to the public. One of the segments was called, "Software as a Service for Law Firms," and featured Tim Hooks of Chester, Willcox & Saxbe, LLP, as well as David Clark of Jones and Waldo. They discussed emerging SaaS technologies, and how SaaS solutions have helped their firms by reducing IT costs, and enabling their lawyers to practice law more efficiently.

At the end of August, at Ilta '09, the NetDocuments management team announced the development of a Google Wave integration. The release of the integration will coincide with the Google development plan.

This announcement has sparked the interest of many people excited about the potential of Google Wave. One of these people is the Google Wave blogger. When Google announced Google Wave, he immediatley saw the potential it offered and started his blog. One of his first posts was titled, "5 Things Wrong with Google Wave." Number four on that list was lack of integration with MS Office. However, he saw a solution to that problem when he heard about what NetDocuments was doing.

Recently, Leonard Johnson was featured as a guest writer for John Mancini's "8 things" blog series with a post titled, "The 8 Things that Changed the History of Document Management."

The blog describes eight disruptive innovations that had large impacts on the way people manage documents. The eight items are as follows:

1. The File Cabinet

2. The Server

3. The PC

4. Electronic Document Management Systems

In the late 90's when NetDocuments was founded, we were one of the worlds first SaaS companies and have since witnessed first hand the evolution of the SaaS market. Recently, Service-Now.com released a white paper titled, "A Brief History of SaaS," and I found it very accurate and informative.

The white paper begins by discussing where traditional boxed software comes up short and how this created the need for SaaS:

Recently, Google announced the future release of Google Chrome OS and this has caused quite a stir on Twitter and in the technology blog scene. Everyone is talking about how cloud computing and SaaS applications are the waves of the future and how they will change the computer industry. Although I beleive this to be true, I still find one glaring weakness in this argument; Cloud computing and SaaS are not only the waves of the future, but are the waves of the here and now.

Guest writer: Keith Schneider, Sr. Account Manager at NetDocuments

"Back from New Orleans after attending the annual Association of Legal Administrators (ALA) national meeting. Although the attendance was off by 35% from last year's we still received good attention at the NetDocuments booth. Because of the economic times the annual meeting was less of a "boondoggle", for those administrators who attended, and more of an educational trip than years past.