Ray Ozzie has added a blog entry for some work they are doing and sharing on extending RSS to enable sharing and syncing of information. I think a number of you may see that this is a updated extension of the work done to implement Groove and Lotus Notes, but done in a simple way that applications can use it the same way they use RSS. One important change here , is that since everything in RSS-SSE is done in XML it will make it the interchange of information between applications much easier than way Groove and Lotus Notes locked you into one way to do things.

Many interesting ideas there to consider for future applications. Let me know what you think.

Also here is an article in eWeek discussing the ideas here.

(Not sure how MS will make any business off this, but it looks like a reasonable way to go.)

One of the challenges for users of applications and creators of applications is how to charge and pay for the applications. CNET has an interesting article pointing out that businesses are less and less willing to pay upfront large fees to buy and deploy applications.

(CNET article Here)

The author has a number of examples of companies concerned about large up front fees, and instead going to use software on a pay as you go basis, with ASP applications like SalesForce.com as an example. That is one approach. I think a more valuable long term approach is for companies to pay for applications on a per user basis and not have only a small charge per server. All these enterprise applications going for large upfront fees are not giving companies the flexibility they need. For example the Dicodemy GForce application has a straight per user fee, and their is no server or enterprise charges involved. The reason some people like the ASP model for applications is that they only pay per user. However, with the ASP model you are giving control of your critical company data to an outside organization. A better solution is to allow you to run the application and services inside your organization, but only pay per user.

One of the people who contributes a broad range of ideas for software enabling people to work together is Ray Ozzie, who is now over at Microsoft working for Bill Gates as a CTO. Ray has started a new blog here (http://spaces.msn.com/members/rayozzie/PersonalSpace.aspx) to share some of his current ideas on software directions at Microsoft. It is a spot I will be watching to see what is new and coming down pipe for improving the future of great software applications.

One of the area that is of interest to a number of teams is how to effectively share contact information among the team members. This is also particularly a challenge for small or medium sized organizations that are working in distributed environments. One way to do that is Groove, (now part of Microsoft). However, Groove by itself does not do enough in this area.

I have been working with the team at Dicodemy (www.dicodemy.net) where there is now a solid application for sharing contact information, company profiles, tracking sales opportunities, having a team calendar and sharing follow up action items. The team has built a windows application that integrates with Groove using Groove Web Services (GWS) to enable you to easily share securely information among the team members.

With the application GForce.CRM and Groove every team member has local access to all the key information on their PC, and at the same time it is being kept in sync with all the other team members. This makes it very easy for me to work when and where I need with my key information always available to me, while keeping the rest of the team up to date on what is going on.