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Web Based CRM is Software as a Service (SaaS) providing Customer Relationship Management functionality on the internet. Instead of buying the software licenses and installing the application on the company infrastructure, customers acquire a subscription to a system which can be accessed via the World Wide Web. Once the subscription fee is paid, customers can directly log into the web based CRM solution.

The crucial benefit of this software delivery model is the fast deployment of the application without having to go go through a costly and lengthy installation process. The absence of company-owned hardware also leads to lower capital investments and reduced operational costs (no need to hire costly system engineers to maintain the hardware infrastructure).

Finally, the cost of the implementation project will also typically be lower. However, this statement must be taken with a grain of salt. In the majority of cases, the business requirements are the most important drivers of the IT project cost. Web Based CRM software allows for fast access to the standard solution provided by the vendor. In many cases (and depending on your business), the standard implementation will not be able to fulfill all business needs.

In this case, additional customization of the On Demand CRM will be required. The more customization, the higher the project budget. So, take this into account when writing the business case.

Web Based CRM software supports many functionalities. The most common ones are SFA, lead management, opportunity management, partner management, customer service and support, contact center management, performance management and e-commerce. Additional more niche functionalities are E-Learning, Quality management and self-service vendors.

The last trends indicate a growing interest in Analytics and extensive integration of internet marketing services. The increasing interest in analytics, by the way, is not limited to web based CRM. The rise of analytics is a general trend in business software where higher levels of transparency are demanded by management on every level: strategic, tactical and operational.

The integration of internet marketing services such as Google’s advertising service Adwords cannot be seen as a surprise. E-commerce and internet advertising are growing year by year. Google has become the number one place where customers go to find information to satisfy their needs and desires. This reality opens a lot of perspective for business. That is why the integration of internet sales and marketing services into web based CRM software is crucial.

The most important web CRM vendors are SalesForce, RightNow and NetSuite. These vendors have designed and implemented their online solutions with the internet in mind. Industry behemoths like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle (with Siebel) fairly recently added an On Demand offering to their portfolio, which in some cases is a web port of their traditional CRM suite.

Now, how to choose the right web based CRM software? The answer to this question depends on a number of criteria: what functionalities are required by your organization? How many users need access to the application? How mature is your IT organization? What is your back office system? How critical is the application? And many more …

Before selecting a customer relationship management solution I would definitely recommend to start with a free trial, which will allow you to try the service before signing-up.

Cedric Rinolda is IT Project Manager and Architect specialized in the implementation of business software. He writes opinions on the evolutions in the world of Software as a Service. Learn more about web based CRM software and choosing the right CRM vendor at his blog.

SAS 70 stands for Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70. It is an auditing standard that was adopted by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and is widely recognized in the auditing of service organizations. An auditor performs an audit on a service organization and that audit is conducted in a way that is compliant with SAS 70. It is that standard statement that says a service organization has been through an extensive audit

This extensive audit measures is that the organization has total control and has safeguards in place that does not compromise any data that they process for their customers. In other words, the job of the audit is to evaluate every aspect of the service organization that handles customer data or could result in a possible leak of customer data.

SAS 70 is necessary for the following reasons:

- It serves as a guide to service organizations when disclosing to their customers how it is they protect their information and how well they do it. The audit results are organized in a report that is easy to follow.

- It is not a checklist audit, but serves as a guide to independent auditors to form an opinion on how well the organization is utilizing their internal controls. There are certain standards that must be met during the audit.

- Provides a set of standards in which the auditor can perform a financial statement audit.

All of the information that is gathered is compiled into two types of reports. These reports are called Type I and Type II.

Type I report

A type I report takes the organizations description of their own controls at a certain point in time and describes those descriptions. The report includes the report by the independent auditor, which is simply the auditor’s opinion, and it includes the organization’s descriptions of their internal controls. There are parts of the report that are optional such as tests that are performed by the auditor and the auditor recording the results of those tests. Another optional area is the inclusion of any other information that the organization provides the auditor about its controls.

Type II report

The type II report is similar to the type I report in a lot of ways. The main difference is that it is mandatory for the auditor to perform tests and record the results of those tests. This is optional with type I. All of the other areas of evaluation remain the same and the inclusion of additional data by the organization is still optional.

How the organization benefits

The organization benefits from SAS 70 because it is receiving an unbiased opinion from the outside regarding the security and the effectiveness of its financial and customer-related controls. In turn, the organization can then work on any areas of weakness, which means that the customers can feel more secure about who they are doing business with. This builds a trust with customers when they know that their financial and/or personal information with the organization are secure. It lets them know who they can turn to when they need what the service organization has to offer.

Also, a service organization that has regular audits performed is an organization that has a long business life ahead of it. As stated before, customers will turn to a secure organization to do business. That means the organization is ensuring itself a long life as long as regular audits are performed to ensure the security of their internal controls. Keeping up with their controls can also save them money from having to eventually bring their controls up-to-date.

Managed Hosting Provider providing state-of-the-art data centre offices. We are SAS 70 and CICA 5970 and Certified, which is the highest available standards for measuring and improving data center operations and management.

Please note, we neither encourage nor endorse or suggest the use of any of the techniques discussed in this article. What we can tell you is that we definitely do not use them and our clients’ sites continue to rank very well on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Always keep in mind that a proper organic way of optimizing your site will take longer than to Sp@m your way to the top rankings BUT you will stay at the top for a long time without running into the risk of being dropped completely from the Search Engine Index!

Link Farms
Link farms and Link Farm Sp@m - aka FFA (free-for-all link sites) were born when more and more webmasters learned that inbound links could heavily influence website rankings.

A link farm is a group of web pages and websites that all hyperlink to every other page and website in the group. Although some link farms were created by hand, most were created through automated programs and services. A link farm is one of the worst forms of sp@mming Search Engine’s index (sometimes called sp@mexing or sp@mdexing).

However, you always have to keep in mind that the Search Engines (actually the people working on the Search Algorithms) evolve with the times! Therefore Google quickly devalued and eventually eliminated the page rank value and ranking positions it assigned to pages with an inordinate collection of links, non-related links and with signs of artificial link building (too many links in a too short a time frame). Nevertheless, link farms still exist as uninformed webmasters and many unethical SEO firms continue to use them.

Mini-Site Networks
In the early stages of the Google Page Rank algorithm, mini-site networks were created to exploit vulnerabilities. Domain names were cheap and the infrastructure costs VPS (Virtual Private Servers) or dedicated servers were cost effective, making it an attractive option.

Many mini-site networks were designed to act as leader pages just as if they were much larger sites. Many topic and/or product specific sites are created, with the goal of linking back to the main site. Each of these mini-sites would use a key phrase rich URL and be especially designed to meet the requirements of specific major search engines. Several SEO firms created artificial link density by weaving mini-site networks from multiple clients together.

In the early stages of the Google Page Rank algorithm this unethical method heavily influenced Google’s perception of the importance of the main sites. However during the summer of 2004 Google did penalize several very prominent SEO firms for using this technique and banned many of their client sites.

Leader Pages
Leader pages are a series of similar pages designed to target 1 or 2 specific keywords and meet requirements of different search engine algorithms. Some people took this a step further and created a page for each phrase and for each search engine. This is one of the original SEO tricks dating back to the earliest days of search when there were almost a dozen leading search engines sorting less than a billion documents. Leader pages are a form of the doorway page technique.

At present, it is considered sp@m by the major Search Engines as they can see multiple copies of what is virtually the same document. Besides, this technique is no longer practical as on-site optimization has much less of an impact on your rankings than proper off-site optimization and Search Engines consider a far wider range of factors to calculate your sites quality score than the arrangement or density of keywords found in a unique page.

Gregory Smyth is the CEO of Inetasia Solutions Limited . Gregory has taken the company to great heights with its various e-business solution products, which have become a backbone infrastructural tool that have powered websites for numerous high profile companies.

There are many reasons in which a data center can fail. It can be quite frustrating, so it is important to know what those reasons are so that you can prevent them or know what to do when they happen. Because a lot of data centers exist on a site separate from the computers that are retrieving data from them, it is important that data centers continue running.

When they go down, all computers pulling from them from various places around a single country or even the world are not going to be able to retrieve any information. Such is true for customer service jobs in which customer information must be retrieved from a secure data center that resides elsewhere. If that data center is not operating, money is lost because employees are unable to do their jobs and customers become very unhappy that their situation cannot be resolved.

Reasons why data centers fail

Some of the reasons why data centers fail can be prevented and then there are some ways in which they cannot. However, it is important to do what is necessary to ensure as few outages as possible.

Here are some reasons for failure:

- The “wear-in” phase - This is the point in time in which the data center has just become operational. It is typical that certain things may fail as they are trying to become fully operational. It is like a toddler learning how to walk. The data center has to walk too, so it is good to let it run with minimal use and gradually build until it has gotten its legs. This involves comprehensive testing as the system usage increases in order to fix problems before they become a problem.

- The “wear-out” phase - This is when the data center is reaching the end of its life. Regular maintenance and care will slow this process, but major parts will eventually wear out. It is ideal to consistently monitor the system in order to predict failure and avoid catastrophe.

- Power failure - Power failure is devastating to anything that relies on it for operation. It is especially devastating to a data center. That is why it is important to have a generator or two ready to take over in case the power goes.

- Generator failure - Generators need care too and they need to be tested. Power goes out and generators take over in order to keep the data center running. Generators have been known to go out and cause data center failure.

- Metal whiskers - If the data center hardware is sitting on a metallic surface, then that metallic surface could grow zinc whiskers. These have been known to cause short circuits, especially in data centers. There are also tin whiskers that grow out from tin and they too cause shorts. Silver whiskers that grow on silver electrical contacts and gold whiskers that develop on gold plated services are also known to cause short outs. Large fans that suck the whiskers in can be used and the elements that produce them can be replaced.

Prevention is key

Prevention is the key to keeping your data center up and running. If any of these elements occur, it is good to stay calm and do what needs to be done to keep the problem from occurring again. If you have experienced generator failure, you may wish to invest in a backup to your main generator. If you’re building a new data center, be sure to use flooring that does not produce any type of metal whiskers that can short out your hardware. By being vigilant, you can ensure that your data center uptime will be at or near 100%.

Providing a network of state-of-the-art data centres. We are CICA 5970 and SAS 70 Certified, which is the highest available standards for measuring and improving data center operations and management.

During Interop New York 2008 Hot Stage I had the opportunity to sit down with Barry Cummings, the team lead for the InteropNet Help Desk to talk to him about his experiences with Interop and EM7.

ScienceLogic: What’s your real job when you’re not here?

Cummings: “I’m a consultant. I have a networking services company through which I offer services all the way from Layer 1 to desktop support.”

ScienceLogic: How long have you been involved with Interop?

Cummings: “I attended my first show in 1996. I volunteered for my first shown in 1999 and haven’t missed a year since.”

ScienceLogic: What makes you want to come back each year for the additional punishment?

Cummings: “Working with the team, which are long-term established friendships at this point. That and the excitement of working with the new technologies as they or even before they come out.”

ScienceLogic: In Las Vegas you were Team Lead for Help Desk. What are you going be doing in NY?

Cummings: “Same thing. That position incorporates some management over the show floor and off show floor area. That’s kinda where they put me and I’ve been doing it solidly for about 5 years.”

ScienceLogic: What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the show over the years, what sticks out?

Cummings: “The amount of monitoring that we have and what we do with it has really been changing. We went from more, to almost none and now back to more. We’ve been through numerous vendors and apps over the years and until recently weren’t overly happy.”

ScienceLogic: Did the integration between Service Desk and Monitoring that ScienceLogic created help streamline things in a meaningful manner?

Cummings: “Absolutely. In the short time that we have to get things setup there’s no way to integrate multiple products in this area. Having things pre-integrated allowed us to quickly link network events and the related tickets together in the management system [EM7].”

ScienceLogic: Moving forward on the Service Desk, do you think you can move away from your current paper driven process to a completely paperless process?

Cummings: “I could potentially see it changing as we get the process down and fine tune it. We might be able to get an electronic interface for people. It’s tough. There’s always going to be an aspect of the shows we have to hand off on paper and get to legacy people such as electricians and movers.”

ScienceLogic: If there was one thing you could improve that you think would make the overall show or help desk operate better, what would it be?

Cummings: “We need to keep refining processes down to get information into EM7. Get better at using the integration and automation that already exists in EM7.”

David Link is president and CEO of ScienceLogic. He and his partners built a thriving company from the ground up by focusing on delivering “products that just work” to the underserved IT operations management marketplace. He has held senior management and corporate officer positions at large public companies.

Custom software development has been created for many different reasons and it is this that has made it unique from other software such as purpose built software. The custom software comes into its own because it is unlike any other software in that it is not mass produced like other software to be sold to millions of users.

Instead, is custom built to suit each user’s needs and preferences. This means that a lot of time and money goes into the software development to get it to the right purpose of the user’s (customers). This can cause some potential problems on one hand though, this is the fact that after the development and selling of the software some customers may not be able to install the software correctly or it may have some bugs in the program.

To be able to sort out these bugs and problems in the software the company will have to spend more time and money in finding and sorting out the bugs which means they will not be able to spend as much of their budget or resources on other projects that the business might want to do like mandatory software.

This may cause some problems with the smaller businesses as they may not be able to fix the bugs in time or run out of money causing them to close down their services. These problems occur because if they are offering their software to a small but broad range of customers each customer’s computer may be different and this might cause conflicts with the software due to the many different components and other software each customer may be running on their machine at the same time.

This is a big problem worldwide for custom developed software and it is rare that a quick solution to the bugs works on all the customers’ computers meaning they have to spend much more time finding a permanent and more thorough solution.

Custom software can be created for a huge variety of things. Many telecommunications software is custom as each phone company operates in a different way meaning that the custom software development team has to create individual software for each company to run on their own systems. Other examples where custom software development is used is for IT companies that provide different services on the internet where different companies need different software to advertise their products properly.

The internet and IT business has moved on leaps and bounds over the past few years and this has meant that boxed software and on the shelf upgrades are no longer helpful as they are outdated very quickly.

This is where the custom developed software comes in very handy as companies are constantly offering upgrades and packages to every specification of every business meaning that everyone can receive the software. This software may include any custom tools or toolbars that the business will need to be produce their products.

A major part of the IT market that uses custom software is the search optimisation market where a lot of custom software is needed for the job they have to do. For example, designing and editing websites uses a lot of custom programs that needed to be updated regularly so the designers can have the latest tools available to make the clients website that bit better.

Overall the custom developed software business is completely necessary to all in the IT business where many different aspects are used, and it is this where custom software comes into its own providing unique software to every business.

IT expert Catherine Harvey looks at the way custom software development assists businesses to provide a better service.

If you are looking for someone in Asia and want to keep in touch with them is no longer difficult nowadays. A free people search on the internet through an online social utility may be your option. Aseanface cannot be mistaken for other ethnic people as they have their unique physical and ethnic features. Once you have found the people you are looking for, you need to keep in touch with them and there is no better place than an online social utility.

You can narrow down your search for a specific nationals or regions in the continent of Asia. For instance, you are looking for a Singaporean, Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese (Myanmar), Brunei Darussalam nationals; these are part of the ASEAN nationals. Look for an asean type online social utility and you will most probably find them there.

Searches on the internet always works better when you try to be more specific. The whole Asian continent is huge and if you just try to search for people using the keyword Asian, then you may not find it easily.

The good thing about these social networks is that they are mostly free to join and become a member. Once you are a member there are so many things you can do about it. First thing you should do is to create your profile so that if you are looking for a friend and they too are looking for you, they can easily find you. Once a member you can browse for registered members and look amongst the groups, forums, or events if who you are looking for is indeed a member.

Once you joined the online social utility website, you can use it to chat online with your friends, relatives, and people around you. You may also chat, send messages, and post events for your groups, post on your blogs and comment on almost anything you want to be part of.

You can also create and have your own blog without opening an account and start posting or blogging so to speak. And if you are interested in one of the forums you can join and give comments to any topics being discussed. Thus, being part or member of an online social utility have a lot of advantages and it is fun.

The best thing for you to do if you are searching for friends and people is to become a member of an online social utility. And in Asia, be specific and learn which region, because an asean face is not difficult to find. And be part of the social network to keep in touch or stay in touch with your newfound friends and people around you.

If You Want To Keep In Touch With Your Friends and People Around You, An Online Social Utility Like http://www.AseanFace.com Can Be of Immense Help.
http://www.aseanface.com/social_forum_home.php

The go-go 90s are history, and now that the partys over, corporations the world over are nursing a king-sized post-bubble hangover. From the factory floor to the data center, businesses large and small are looking to reduce costs by wringing maximum efficiency out of scarce resources. In short, everyones looking to do more with less.

This trend is especially true in IT. Todays computing infrastructure is absolutely critical to a modern organization. From email to file servers to ERP systems, the health of a business is dependent on the health of its IT infrastructure. In spite of ITs growing importance, budget constraints are forcing CIOs to manage increasingly complex hardware and software infrastructures without increasing the ranks of system administration personnel. In fact, many organizations are experiencing staffing reductions, making this task even more daunting for those left behind.

Navigating todays tough business environment means effectively managing the existing mission critical infrastructure without increasing costs or administrative resources. One of the ways to accomplish this is by leveraging server management to increase the level of automation for routine but necessary tasks. Let’s take a look at what server management entails, as well as the various types of server management tools available today and what they can do to make life easier for today’s harried CIO or IT manager.

Why Server Management?

Make no mistake: Server management is absolutely necessary. Server OSes must be patched, applications must be upgraded, new applications must be installed, and server configurations must be frequently audited to ensure that corporate policies and guidelines are being followed. The difference lies in the level of automation: performing these vital tasks manually takes time and puts a strain on scarce resources.

The key to doing more with less means using server management tools that automate many of the tasks currently performed manually.

Corey Ferengul, vice president and principal analyst of Operations Strategies at the META Group, says there are numerous tools available for server management. These tools perform tasks such as server provisioning, configuration auditing, patch deployment, inventory, execution of administrative tasks, and monitoring of server log files, says Ferengul. Successful server management automates many of these tasks so they run behind the scenes.

Have Tools, Will Automate

As the recent flurry of damaging, selfreplicating worms demonstrated, OS patching to repair vulnerabilities is a critical server management task. But, manually managing the constant stream of security patches and updates quickly becomes a Sisyphean task: You need to promptly apply patches, yet you also must test them to ensure that they don’t interfere with the computing environment. And just when the madness stops, another virus or worm attack begins the cycle anew.

Enter server management: There are server management tools available that take some of the drudgery out of patch/update application by automating this process. These tools enable administrators to instantly apply a patch or update to multiple servers from a central location. Tools are in the works that maintain details on server configuration and automatically download, test, and install OS and application patches when needed.

Another task that server management can automate is preparing newly acquired servers for service. In a 2003 Yankee Group study, the Yankee Group’s Jamie Gruener, senior analyst for Enterprise Computing and Networking, points out that 76% of system administrators install server OSes and applications in other words, perform server provisioning manually.

According to the study, some of the tasks that must be performed when provisioning a server include OS installation, network identification configuration, application installation and configuration, storage capacity provisioning, configuration of user and application-centric policies, and testing and establishment of backup procedures. Server management tools that ease this burden by providing server-provisioning automation are compelling and can save both time and money.

Inventory and asset management is another necessary task that’s amenable to automation. Most organizations have policies that govern the proper configuration of hardware assets, including application and licensing requirements. Tools that maintain configuration information and automatically audit systems for compliance can add tremendous value.

So Whats Out There Now?

The aforementioned 2003 Yankee Group study defines four broad, feature-based categories for server provisioning tools: policy-based server management; provisioning, inventory, and asset management; change and configuration management; and image management. CIOs looking to purchase server management tools should assess their needs and apply this feature-based methodology when evaluating tools.

Image management tools manage OS and application images used for rapid deployment of corporate-approved configurations across multiple servers. Change and configuration management tools focus on the deployment and administration of application and OS software updates and patches. Inventory and asset management tools are used for auditing server assets and ensuring that production configurations are in tune with standard, policy-based images. Finally, policy-based server management and provisioning tools combine elements of all the aforementioned tools into one. (For specifics on some of the tools available, see “Server Management Tools”.)

The Holy Grail

The Holy Grail of server management is the automated, behind-the-scenes distribution of computing resources where needed. This is currently getting quite a bit of press in the marketplace and is known by various names, including utility computing and computing on demand.

The underlying vision is that of a server management application that constantly monitors computing resources, such as processor power, memory, and bandwidth, and instantly optimizes the deployment of those resources based on demand. In the ideal world of utility computing, idle infrastructure capacity is minimal because resources are constantly being deployed where they are needed the most.

In this vision, a server farm is transformed from a collection of discrete, isolated devices into a common, readily available pool of computing power.

While this vision is not yet market reality, companies such as IBM, HP, and Sun are busy developing applications to implement it. IBM has been especially active in the promotion of “autonomic computing”: IT infrastructure that is able to monitor, configure, heal, and regulate itself without manual intervention. As server management evolves, this is a trend that IT administrators and CIOs should keep in their sights.

The Future

As server management tools evolve, the level of automation they provide will continue to increase. Ferengul, for example, says server management tools will soon provide more integration between server monitoring and administration. In this scenario, Ferengul says, monitoring tools trigger automated actions from provisioning or configuration change tools. The Yankee Group’s Gruener foresees server management tools that measure resource allocation and use so that computing power use can be charged for by IT departments.

This article is distributed by Server Buddies Server Management and Monitoring by Server Buddies

Three years ago, the OMB set a June 2008 deadline “by which all agencies’ infrastructure (network backbones) must be using IPv6 and agency networks must interface with this infrastructure.”

Agencies are supposed to demonstrate that they can:
*Transmit IPv6 traffic from the Internet and external peers, through the core (WAN), to the LAN.
*Transmit IPv6 traffic from the LAN, through the core (WAN), out to the Internet and external peers.
*Transmit IPv6 traffic from the LAN, through the core (WAN), to another LAN (or another node on the same LAN).
(Source: OMB IPv6 FAQs)

One year ago, the OMB reviewed the Enterprise Architecture Assessment Framework results and found that six of the twenty-four agencies were on track to achieve the June deadline. Two months ago, there was a good article by Carolyn Marsan Duffy about the status of compliance. Take a look at this article because it seemed like there was a lot of backpedaling going on about meeting the date-using phrases like “we don’t like the term mandate” and “more of a recommendation than a mandate.” At the time, only three agencies were in compliance.

Duffy just wrote an updated article, “Feds say they have aced IPv6 deadline”, and suddenly two months later, all lights seem green. As of June 24, ten of the twenty-four agencies sent emails to the OMB stating that “they have successfully transmitted IPv6 packets.” Fourteen still need to report in, but none have asked for an extension. And all of it was done through the regular tech refresh budget over the past three years. So if this is true, kudos to the feds!

Right around the time of the first not-so-rosy article, we ran a survey at FOSE, the big federal government IT show. We asked attendees if their agencies would be ready by the deadline:
*33% said they would be ready
*6% said they were already there
*33% said they would NOT be ready
*About a quarter didn’t know

What was really interesting is that we asked this same question in 2007, and the audience was equally split (yes/no) on whether or not their agencies would meet the mandate-1 in 5 (2007) instead of 1 in 3 (2008).

So what can explain these numbers? Surprisingly, out of the attendees we talked to, only 65% of them said that IPv6 is important to their operations, making it second to last on the list of IT priorities covered by the survey. Maybe the answer lies in the relative “unimportance” of the milestone - that just the network backbones (and the routers supporting them) be capable of passing IPv6 packets. The true test for government IT workers will be when actual IPv6 applications must be supported which will impact networks, systems, application and monitoring tools throughout the government.

So was this a nice checklist item for the Bush administration? This initial deadline is the only one for IPv6 mandates from the current OMB incarnation. Actually running IPv6 applications, that’s a whole ‘nother story, apparently for a new administration.

Julia Lim is VP of Marketing for ScienceLogic, at IT company specializing in server monitoring software. Julia has extensive corporate, strategic and product marketing experience at companies ranging from early-stage startups to large public firms. She has an MBA in technology marketing from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

You hear the word Ajax a lot these days, particularly in technology, so; what are people talking about? A Greek hero from the Odyssey - sure. A bathroom cleanser that gets your sink sparkly - indeed. But today, more often then not, Ajax refers to a specific type of web programming that has taken the internet by storm.

The term Ajax was coined as shorthand for - Asynchronous JavaScript and XML by a man named Jesse James Garrett who founded a technical consultancy called Adaptive Path. He would want me to make it clear that Ajax is not an acronym (so it isn’t spelled AJAX).

What Mr. Garrett described back in 2005 was a stack of technologies (not a single technology) being used at the time by very cutting-edge web sites. This stack of technologies allowed web sites to be turned from a set of static documents connected by hypertext links into something that approximated a true application. This was the intellectual birth (or coming out party anyway) of the Rich Internet Application (RIA).

At the heart of Ajax is a software object built into all browsers called the XMLHttpRequest object. This mouthful is frequently shortened to XHR for those that want to talk about it in fewer syllables. This software object allows JavaScript code, executed in the browser, to go out and request data from a server without reloading a page.

This technology was not new in 2005, but Mr. Garrett put a catchy name to it, and people noticed. Around the same time, a number of web applications such as Gmail emerged and people wondered, “how the heck did they do that?”

Think of a typical web page as one where you have to click a link or submit a form then wait for a new page to be returned to see your result. It’s slow and doesn’t really act the way we expect software to act. Now look at web applications like Flickr, Gmail, or Youtube. You can click in a box and enter some data, and your updates happen without you leaving the page. The magic that’s happening in the background is Ajax (or and XRH call).

With Ajax, the idea is that you get a richer, faster user experience. Properly implemented, a web page can become a rich internet application (RIA). Most extremely popular web sites use Ajax to some degree. Amazon’s rating system, where you click on the number of stars you give a book or CD is one example.

Even though Ajax and XMLHttpRequest both refernce XML, the data that is used does not necessarily have to be formatted as XML. In fact, more and more other data formats, such as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), are being used. One restriction on XHR is called the single origin policy. This is a security policy, enforced by the browsers, that only allows JavaScript to request data from the server that originally served up a page. There is a technique using JSON that get around this restriction.

Since 2005 a number of toolkits have emerged that have allowed web developers to more easily implement Ajax in their applications. Some of these are Dojo, Prototype, jQuery, GWT, YUI… and many many others.

As a technology stack, Ajax is now quite mature and being used almost everywhere on the web. Ultimately, the most important thing to remember is to create the best posisble user experience.

John Moore is a Web 2.0 expert who creates Rich Internet Applications. He has created the web’s first RIA community at http://www.riaspot.com