Good ideas: trust.salesforce.com

The web is often a much more stable, avaliable, adaptive, and usable environment for businesses than hacking together old Excel spreadsheet and sharing them via a network drive. It can also be far cheaper than adopting the Sun, Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle software stack's to manage information and customers. That said, the pressure is still on the web service providers to keep finding ways to prove this to customers..

Even as Web 2.0 has moved millions of common computer tasks (such as IM, email, document creation, and even gaming) onto the Internet, the corporate world has been highly skeptical. That isn't surprising, corporations are often very slow to adopt new technology. Moving away from a heavy IT infrastructure and towards service based platforms has a lot of risks and SalesForce has been trying to woo more corporations to take the plunge for several years now.

One of their really good ideas from the SalesForce camp is called trust.salesforce.com. Here everyone, customer or no, can peek into their network operations center and see how things are going. The information is public and not always very flattering. Various icons and information messages let you know what the current status is and when there is a service disruption. It also lists scheduled maintenance windows and impacted systems.

This is a good idea and more companies should follow suit if they hope to attract people away from the business software stacks and onto online only equivalents. Those who provide services targeted at corporations (Google? Amazon? Microsoft?) especially need to do this as their current black box approch is hurting adoption. The more open service providers are, the fewer excuses IT Managers and CTOs will have to keep business tasks in house.