We were pleased to roll out another release recently with a whole bunch of new features.

The level of positive feedback across all our channels and countries has been excellent, from phone calls, emails, twitter, skype, instant messenger and more.

There have been so many positive comments and it has only been out a few days - have a read below and you will get the idea. Try it and tell your friends!

Sure, there were a few areas that needed a tweak or two, but 90% of reported issues were cosmetic and the vast majority are already fixed and live. This the great thing about SaaS - continuous improvement and community driven quality and ideas. We love it!

Faster. Better. Easier.

That is what we live for - saving you time and helping you do more while simplifying your life. It is being made available to all users immediately. No upgrade hassles, no effort no additional cost. That what I call Good SaaS.

The main areas of improvement are listed below the comments from our fans.

Fans love it

• Congratulations on the new release going live – it looks and feels terrific - Marytn from My CFO
• New version looks great. Huge improvement on the previous one (and that one was pretty good anyway) - Ben from CompSyc
• Love the improved interface, abundance of printing and export options. Accounting that makes sense at last, thank you. I will be migrating several other accounts at the end of the financial year as there is no point in struggling with the obtuse behaviour of MYOB any longer !! - Hew from Coral Sea Superannuation Fund
• Love the new look - Michelle from Lorose
• Overall very good. Think you are doing a great job, well done - Jason from Computer Support Partners (Ryde Franchisee)

The new stuff

• Speed - some of screens in our top 5 have been reduced by 60%
• Look and feel - most screens make better use of real estate and improved readability
• Transact - cleaner, simpler faster transaction screens that work faster and make your keying easier but have more features
• Activities - manage your to dos, meeting minutes, docs and more. Do the same for your team. Show the boss how much you do every day. Rack activities at the project, client, tag and even transaction level (complex quotes are now easy). This was talked about earlier.
• Catch - the quick way of capturing activities in seconds, now you can easily remember those five action items from every phone call.
• Just one click - extended the number of features that are one click away to over 90%
• Reports - better access to loads of reports, lists, views, exporting and more
• Tags - No more inflexible categorisation, use one or a dozen tags across the whole system to file, group, filter, list and more. Probably a world first(?) for online accounting we think.
• Get social - one click access to around 200 million entries in professional and social networks like face book, linked in, my space, bebo, orkut to see info on your prospects, partners and more. This was pre-announced recently
• Get connected - see maps of addresses on Google maps, search from the dashboard using Catch, connect to salesforce.com for advanced CRM, connect to 88miles.net for project timesheetings, connections for more banks, improved security logging, improved security reporting, improved security control for system-to-system connectors.
• Get control - improved role based security to span one or more businesses and subscriptions, franchises and corporate
• Payroll - drop your old payroll provider and get online, email payslips, automated bulk processing and banking

See it scream

See the new features page for more details and screen shots or watch the new quick tour video.

By the way, it looks sensational on the Mac, and screams on Safari and firefox on Mac OSX, Windows XP and Vista. The best thing? This just the beginning

This release is timed to coincide with CeBIT too so make sure you come on down and see the greatest technology and business show in the southern hemisphere. Our stand and a little of our presentation will be featuring the new release.

Gartner, arguably one of the most respected research firms globally has given the iPhone the big OK for use by big companies for their applications.

The link above is kindly provided by Cebit, we are presenting soon at Cebit 2008 and we won the coveted platinum excellence in innovation award there last year.

We commented recently and accurately in this blog on the earth shattering impact of the iPhone web access demonstrated with hard numbers, so this endorsement by Gartner is no surprise to the team here at saasu but it is a huge green light for businesses all around the world, not just the big end of town.

This is another reason saasu made the right decision getting the current release of saasu working on the apple itouch (ipod that looks like iphone but without the phone). See the saasu netaccounts on iphone demo video a happy saasu customer made even before we announced it.

It is also why the new release of saasu includes integration with google maps and hundreds of millions of people’s profiles on the big Professional and Social Networking (PSN) sites. More on that tomorrow.

The whole world is getting more saas-y, not just the big end of town. Now you can run your multi country business on your iphone with the SaaS Ecosystem including Saasu.

For an industry segment that used to be geek central, most of our new sales are now from non-tech firms and non-tech people in those firms.

On a lighter note we now also have a potential theme movie for the Saas industry - Saas Girl or similar in name at least - is about to be released, watch the saasy girl trailer.

We are also working on a marketing idea for saas girl and saas guy but more on that later, anticipation is half the fun.

We reviewed our hosting provider again recently as part of a major upgrade in capacity to handle our growth.

Saasu client data (and our own) sits inside some pretty cool technology infrastructure in an extremely high grade location with world class qualifications including some from financial institutions and government security organisations.

Just some of our technology infrastructure features -

• Guards on the front door
• Hundreds of cameras
• Concrete all round - including the roof
• Biometric security
• Multiple levels of steel access doors and cages
• Multiple levels of redundant power, telecommunications and air conditioning
• Laser smoke particle detection; not to mention
• 24×7 monitoring plus
• Heavy duty protection from ram raids and even plane crashes

That helps us well sleep at night and we think it helps thousands of our users to sleep well at night too.

We also had yet another client with laptop problems recently. This follows a long line of similar client problems with their equipment being lost or stolen from client offices and cars not to mention dropped or broken laptops. All these events mean their business is impacted negatively because of lost data because many people still use software with local data copies on their PC/Mac.

But not if they use SaaS. In every case the saasu.com clients get up and running in minutes with much relief.

No loss of -

• Data (nor any data disclosure risk) - just find another computer with Internet access
• Time just when you need that time the most
• Revenue
• Client Satisfaction

It is unlikely any laptop with a local copy of your financial records will ever offer the same security and peace of mind as SaaS ‘big iron’ technology infrastructure.

Yet another reason why SaaS (Software as a Service) will prevail over Software for most businesses in the long run and why more and more are realising this benefit every single day.

I spoke at the NSW.net ICT cluster last week to a bunch of potential and current Microsoft Partners (we work on all operating systems for your information). I gave our 5 minute pitch and as usual during Q&A there were lots of questions (SaaS is a hot topic at the moment). We always get a security question and my answer is always the same, it’s a bunch of questions that effectively return the challenge. I only asked a couple of these but I’ve listed some others I often ask as well. (more…)

Symantec is quoting in the market that “70% of businesses surveyed access their email via a phone or PDA but 69% didn’t have have password protection, 74% didn’t have Virus Protection and 77% didn’t have a firewall. This indicates a huge security risk for these companies.”. Interestingly this was also a hot topic at a conference I just attended.

You can have one user be given access to a particular file within your group of company files. Access is also completely customisable down to specific features or reports using Roles once a user has access to the file.

When you want to give someone access to one of your files sign into the file itself and then invite them from the “Membership” link in the main menu. The new user will be sent an invite for that specific file only to their email address which they then need to activate (by clicking a link in the email) to gain access (we do this to check the email address is valid for security reasons).

To add someone to another file just change to that file and repeat the process.

What if I have someone who needs access to lots of my files?

Contact us and we will attach them for you if you need access changes made for hundreds of files or users in one batch. Instructions must be in writing and be extremely specific.