Ask HN: Strategies for managing the proliferation of office SaaS products?

2 points by cml 4 years ago | 2 comments

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 4 years ago |

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)

cml 4 years ago | |

I appreciated the way that the reports are organized by problem-being-solved. It might be nice to be able to filter for specific constraints (like "SSO Support") so as to exclude services in each category that are non-starters.

It seems like Tooltip is focused on the procurement/administration side of things. What about being a user? I mentioned SSO above because maintaining credentials for a lot of different services is cumbersome even with a password manager. Re-discovery of information I know I have seen somewhere suffers since it's harder to remember on which platform I saw it when there are multiple possibilities.