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ASP: Inside out

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DQW Bureau
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In Internet parlance, 'ASP' stands for Application Service Provider. These are the businesses that hope to provide us with programs and services that live directly on the Web, rather than primarily on our PCs. 

Some of the benefits these ASP-resident programs and services offer include: that you can access them from any Web browser--you never have to load the program onto a PC from a CD; if you are in a business you never have to go to the trouble and expense of keeping every PC current, since the application is updated once on the ASP's server; and you never have to administer a complex application--that task falls to the ASP. You have essentially outsourced a portion of your IT effort to the ASP.

If you have ever managed a corporate IT department, you know that these are some powerful positive arguments for the ASP model. Of course, there are concerns as well, such as: How safe is your data on the ASP's server farm--do they implement an effective backup policy?

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How secure it the data, since you would not want sensitive corporate data to be a click away from a nefarious competitor? What happens to your data if the ASP goes belly-up? Who legally owns the data you've stored there? How good (and redundant) is the ASP's infrastructure, and its ties to the Internet? How effective will the ASP be in preventing downtime, or in restoring operation in the face of a problem?

(Even well-healed, and highly respected and motivated companies such as Microsoft, can run into problems delivering ASP-like services, as evidenced by the recent seven-day-long partial outage of MSN Messenger So these (and more) are good questions that you'd want to have answered before committing your business data to an ASP.

But it is NOT just for Big business

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In the back of my mind, I would always thought of ASPs as being of interest primarily to larger businesses. But AnchorDesk's David Coursey has just convinced me that the benefits that an ASP can provide, coupled with easy-to-use and aesthetic ASP-based applications, can also extend the value of ASPs to home and small business users alike! 

In his column, David demonstrates Intuit's QuickBase, a Web-resident database that makes it easy for the uninitiated to store their information online, with the option to make it available to others. For example, you could put your product database online, and your salespeople could access it in real time from any customer's Web browser. Or an ad hoc corporate workgroup could easily share their project data. Or you could put your baseball team's roster there, and allow anyone on the team to gain access. 

Or... I won't duplicate David's explanation, or some of the answers to the questions I've posed that Intuit answers at but I encourage you to explore the sample database that David set up at - it demonstrates the ease of access and the flexibility of this relatively simple online database application. You can also give it a try yourself -- the first three databases are free. (By the way, there's a fair amount of power hidden under this database's covers -- check out its Help system to explore the formulas, functions, and other capabilities that can be used.) 

I must admit -- whenever I've thought of ASPs in the past, my unresearched and unfounded mental image has been of traditional, complex PC applications offloaded onto a Web server, presenting a possibly slow interface to users at the other end of an Internet connection. But QuickBase has demonstrated to me that by applying the mantra of "aesthetics + ease-of-use" to ASP-hosted applications, their inherent flexibility can offer significant value for a wide range of uses. 

The questions I posed earlier, and more, still do need to be carefully answered for any non-casual use of ASPs. But QuickBase makes the value of this computing model more clear. Many years ago, as computer networking was just getting started, I tagged many of my presentations with the phrase "The Network IS the System." These days, it seems to be coming true.

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