Have you tried using Software as a Service (SaaS)? If so, could you tell us a bit about your experience? Are there any lessons learned that you could share to help other organizations make wise decisions when considering hosted software?

Just in case you weren't familiar with the term, here's a little more from Wikipedia about what Software as a Service means:

Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms.

We believe that SaaS allows organizations to concentrate on what they do best – their mission.

The world is quickly moving faster to the web running applications. Google gets this as they are launching Chrome OS to run these applications.

The world is also changing into a very distributed workplace. At Donor Tools we often work with organizations who have offices in multiple locations in the world. All of these people can now collaborate and work more effectively on making the world better.  They are all working with a single set of data that is live and updated as they work,  even from home or their iPhone. If they do have IT staff, they can focus on more important issues. In fact we give users free support just to allow this to happen.

We built our donor management software as a SaaS model. We did this because we wanted give a powerful tool for nonprofits that was simple to use, manage and implement. 

At the end of the day what matters is results and if the system allows nonprofits to achieve their mission.  

We just implemented a SaaS Document management system called KnowledgeTree (that actually runs on Servers of Amazon.com on the backend). The implementationw as a breeze and access to documents has been pretty fast inspite of large files.

This success has emboldened us to look at migrating email from a traditional hosting provider to a SaaS offering from Google or Microsoft BPOS.

In my experience, SaaS is especially relevant to small/smaller non-profits.

Larger non-profits have professional IT staff and have much higher capability and desire to host/control the software internally.

I have seen small non-profits cite the following as most common advantages of web-based (SaaS) software:

• Low or no cost for initial setup, hardware etc.
• Ability for the board members and volunteers to access and work on the same data from their homes/work etc.
• Removes the need to have IT experts/consultants on staff (IF the software is properly designed for non-technical people, which is not always the case!)

Yes,Software as a Service (SaaS) web hosting service is a software distribution model in which the applications are hosted by <a href=www.managed.com/.../>Saas Vendors</a> or web hosting service provider.