After our popular "Best Practices for Building an Online eLibrary" webinar, we had many inquiries about how specific elements of the content applied in a corporate library environment. As such, we are offering a new webinar targeted specifically toward corporate librarians entitled "Creating Your Corporate eLibrary".

This introductory session is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 1 PM Eastern Time, and registration is free.

For more information about our webinars or to register, visit http://www.INM.com/webinars/.

In a rather provocative talk at Project World 2008 last week, IBM's Practice Leader, Scott Ambler, shared a secret: He admits that accepted best practices in software development are no longer best practices.

“Writing a detailed requirement spec up-front is a worst practice, despite being considered a best practice for the longest time,” said Ambler. “When you do this, you are building to specs, as opposed to building to what people actually need.”

Everything in this industry is now pointing to the same direction. As such, developers must:

• establish a long-term vision but design for the short term
• release projects in small iterations
• make project components as independent as possible from each other
• and, first and foremost, connect every feature to a stakeholder's needs

It was bound to happen. First we saw Software as a Service (SaaS), now we have Platforms as a Service (PaaS). SaaS’s refer to on-tap applications that are available on an as-needed basis. In the early days, many of these services were faceless and designed to be hidden behind other applications. These days, there is an increasing number of SaaS’s that have an embeddable user interface, with some even offering a configurability for users (through a preferences button, for example) or programmers (through parameters included in the initialization call, for example).

A PaaS is a programming or programmable environment presented as a rich Internet application (RIA). Bungee Connect is such an example. It looks like a MS Visual Studio reincarnated into an RIA and has a very strong leaning towards mashing up SaaS's. On the lighter side, you get something like Blist , a database management system meant for business users, not programmers. It strangely looks like what Filemaker should have become had it jumped the RIA curve. In the lower-level "enabling software" category you find Elastra, a database design and management environment that lives in Amazon's EC2/S3 environment. It directly competes against Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL type solutions, but with a different business model. It makes MySQL and Postgress available “on-tap” at a rate of 50 cents per server/hour under a hassle-free, no-install environment.

Other experimental projects include Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, but generally this trend means that, in hindsight, SaaS is not such a crazy idea after all. Compared to PaaS, SaaS suddenly sounds quite reasonable and conservative.