I’m quite a fan of “Software as a Service” (SaaS).  The idea of having access to everything from anywhere is pretty appealing to me and I’ll give you a practical example of what I mean:

A couple of months ago a friend had asked me to prepare a quiz for her birthday.  Trying to plan things a little in advance for once, I wrote the quiz a week or so before the event and emailed it to her from my Gmail account asking her to get in touch if she had any problems with it.  That’s where I went wrong!

A day before the quiz I was at the airport waiting to catch a flight to Barcelona to see my brother.  I got a text message just as the flight was called……..”Hi.  Hope you’re ok.  Have you managed 2 sort out the quiz for 2moro?”

My heart sank for a second as I realised that she hadn’t received the email.  I had let her down.  If only I’d called her after I’d sent the email I wouldn’t be in this predicament!

I figured out that all was not lost as I strapped my seatbelt on.  Of course! My email (and all its attachments) were in the cloud somewhere.  All I had to do was get access to the Internet, logon to my Gmail account and I could sort it out. 

If this had happened five years ago I couldn’t have fixed it but with SaaS email it was easy.  Long live SaaS and Gmail!