Enterprise AJAX 
December 10th, 2005
There was a recent Forbes article about AJaX [1] and what to use and not use it for. The conclusion, of course entirely valid, was that AJAX is good for applications but not if it puts into jeopardy the monetization (essentially adverstisement and search engine rankings) of your application.
I find it difficult to understand what the products from Writely, Zimbra and gOffice (all of which are very nice - though gOffice does need some polish to reach the MyWebOS [2] level) have to offer the “Business Leaders” who read Forbes? Is some management team going to go ahead and use Writely to collaborate to come up with their business strategy? Or uninstall MS Office / Open Office and take up gOffice?
So if the enterprise is not going to use hyped-up, Web 2.0′d-up, mash’d-up applications then why should they care about AJAX? In my mind there is one great place for AJAX in the enterprise and that is for Intranet applications. If some accounting person is entering / editing / whatever hundreds or thousands of transactions then using regular HTTP POST’s to update the data, it is going to take an order or magnitude longer than an AJAX solution. If you have someone managing hierarchical or master-detail type data then AJAX can provide even more time savings. So not only are we talking real savings in dollars and cents [3] but it also results in happier more productive employees on the whole. The AJAX solutions that enable those types of savings are where the business value lies.
Although currently the hype is focused on the free Web 2.0 type AJAX applications, we will soon see it shift to inside the firewall where true efficiency gains can be made.
References
[1] Cleaning Up On the Web with AJAX - Tom Taulli, Nov 23, 2005
[2] MyWebOS - Dave Johnson, July 14, 2005
[3] Measuring the Benefits of AJAX - Alexei White
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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 10th, 2005 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Web2.0, AJAX, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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January 10th, 2006 at 3:14 am
�Or uninstall MS Office / Open Office and take up gOffice?�
Probably not go as far as uninstalling it, but sure, the enterprise is adopting wiki-style solutions more and more, and I see tools like Writely and Jotspot as extensions of the trend. Desktop apps like MS-Office were designed for an era where paper was king. Now, online collaboration and sharing are more important � it�s pretty unproductive having to keep mailing a Word doc back and forth when you could just host it somewhere and edit at the same time. Or having to work around a bloated, unusable, mid-90s �enterprise document management system�. The enterprise has a lot to gain from these new tools.
Don�t get me wrong, the tools you mention are still very green in enterprise terms. The trend, though, is important for the Forbes set to be monitoring.
The so-called �Web 2.0? tech in general has a lot to offer the enterprise. Corporate/internal blogging is one early example. If you look at some of the new sites, like Digg for instance, I think you can see how useful the concepts would be in a large company.
January 10th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Web 2.0 is a term without much substance - the internet evolve just as anything else, calling it a new version is pointless. I do however like many of the ideas incorporated into the web 2.0 term, and firmly believe in mashing, �social software� etc. Ajax though is very important for web applications. We use Ajax extensively in 24SevenOffice and we have many customers who have converted from locally installed applications to our web based application. And this is customers who cannot and will not wait for a slow web page. Entering details into an invoice while the customer is one the phone is only possible with the use of Ajax.
January 10th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
I certainly agree that these sorts of tools, although they are green, can be important to the enterprise. While there is a place for ajax in the enterprise intranet setting I think that there may be interesting lessons for desktop application vendors to learn from ajax. I can�t help but wonder what would happen if MS Word adopted a slightly more wiki�ed approach or had a _good_ collaboration tool?