HACKER Q&A
📣 cml

Strategies for managing the proliferation of office SaaS products?


This tweet (https://twitter.com/gossipbabies/status/1487161069143576576) resonated with me and I wonder how common my experience is. Working at smallish web software companies over the past few years I have observed a trend toward increasingly many specialized SaaS products for stuff that might previously have been handled by (for example) emails, spreadsheets and documents.

Are you seeing this as well? What kinds of systemic issues do you think might arise from this sort of change? Have you, or your organizations, evolved any strategies for balancing operational complexity and information siloing against the perceived benefits of this kind of SaaS specialization?

  👤 jedgardyson Accepted Answer ✓
Some key rules I've found are to avoid the challenges you're describing are to evaluate quality (use the software + check their docs + talk to customers) and portability (actually make sure the exports work the way you need them to) before considering using or recommending any new piece of saas

Working on a search/review/ratings engine (https://tooltip.com), that currently operates as a consulting service, because I've found that parsing through all the muck is a waste of human time and anxiety (also, ppl often end up on the WRONG solution because they didn't have enough time or the right resources to search)

Edit: More immediate practical strategies are to use a spreadsheet that aggregates up from the dept level to the company level to keep track of all users/accounts, or buy a piece of SAAS to manage dedicated procurement / billing (there are a few alternatives out there on this front nowadays)