Registration for this event is now open — please CLICK HERE here to learn more and register today!

This year AssurX will host its first annual Life Sciences Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting in Las Vegas, NV. This industry-specific event will start with a kickoff dinner, followed by two days of training sessions, best practices, customer case studies and more. Instead of holding an annual general user conference, we’ve listened to our customers and decided to hold industry specific events with our most recent one for our energy industry customers.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to:

• Learn from your peers
• Talk with experts about the latest industry developments
• Spend one on one time in the computer lab with AssurX’s professional services team
• Attend break out sessions
• See new product features
• Listen to customer case studies
• Participate in roundtable Q&As
• Network!

Tentative schedule:

• October 4, 2009 – Kickoff dinner and networking event
• October 5 – 6, 2009 – Case studies, training opportunities, all-day sessions, computer lab time.

Stay tuned for updates, final agenda and registration information.

The CATSWeb Measurements feature makes it easy to track performance to goals, monitor trends and automatically send performance-based alerts. Measurements can be added to executive and corporate dashboards to provide important, easy to read, quality metrics information. Not only does this give you feedback about your performance to goal and trends, it also allows you to focus your resources on the areas of the business that need attention. Detailed information can be easily accessed by clicking on the metric of interest. All this is done within CATSWeb without relying on any third party tools or add-ons.

Because most of us don’t have time to look at these dashboards every day, alerts may be configured to automatically send E-mail notifications when the metrics change. Measurements can link to any data source such as internal system data like queries and filters, and with all system reports and graphs in CATSWeb – the source data can even be ‘external’  – such as from ERP and HR systems – or other Oracle and Microsoft databases.

It’s easy to set up a measurement:

1. From the Manage page, click on Measurements and choose “Add” (or copy an existing one)
2. Enter your company goals
3. Then add the measurement to a Dashboard

The CATSWeb Measurements Feature provides an easy way to track progress to goals and alert you when thresholds are crossed. This helps your company to:

• Achieve its corporate goals
• Broaden visibility regarding those goals
• Reduce cycle times
• And ensure that tasks get completed on time

Let us know what corporate goals you are tracking (or would like to track) and how you are using the Measurements Feature in CATSWeb.

When you use AssurX’s CATSWeb Enterprise Quality and Compliance Management system, you enter records and tasks such as:

• Corrective Actions
• Nonconformance Reports
• Defects
• Change Requests
• Audits and Findings
• Complaints
• Training Tasks
• and more

With each of these processes there is usually an associated ‘due date’ or ‘goal date’ and in the system your are automatically notified via email upon assignment and sent reminder emails when these dates are approaching. There is even auto escalation for items that are past due with notifications to management and even auto reassignments for critical items.

All of this functionality is aimed at improving

• responsiveness
• increasing customer satisfaction
• reducing cycle times and
• ensuring the tasks get completed on time — meaning in the end –  costs are reduced

To enhance this BUILT-IN functionality AssurX has added the Calendar Display part. The Calendar Display Part allows you view your quality and compliance records and tasks in a convenient calendar format. Each calendar can be set up to filter data on the fly. For example you can display your personal tasks or your department tasks. It comes with several viewing formats such as multi-month and calendars can be added to a users home page.

Calendars can link to any data source such as internal system data like queries and filters.  And like all system reports and graphs in CATSWeb, the source data can even be external such as from ERP and HR systems or Oracle and Microsoft databases. The Calendar display part also allows you to manage and display the corporate workdays and holidays.

It’s easy to set up a calendar.

1. From the CATSWeb Manager – add the Calendar Display part and fill out the properties
2. Select the data source whether it be from a query or even an external data set
3. Add the Calendar to a user Dashboard – and you’re all set

So in combination with automatic email notifications, reminders and escalation, the Calendar Display Part is an easy way to give employees visibility to important upcoming events and help your company: improve responsiveness, increase customer satisfaction, reduce cycle times and ensuring the tasks get completed on time.

The idea of software as a service is not new and in fact AssurX has offered its CATSWeb enterprise quality and compliance system in a hosted environment for over 10 years.  However, there has always been a certain resistance in business for utilizing this software model.  The reasons have varied from security issues to wanting to have control over the platforms to a perception that the data just needs to be in-house.  For several years, though, businesses have been looking to reduce their overall costs, including those involved with IT.  As a result SaaS has much more appeal as it can significantly help to reduce the overall cost of ownership.

One of the chief issues that have confounded IT, though, is system integration.  No system is the be-all-to-end-all.  ERP systems will generally handle most of the basic functions of a business, however there are aspects like complaint management, auditing, CAPA, etc., that are not fully covered by these systems – hence the need for multiple applications and the need to integrate.

The next argument from many is that if our systems are all hosted we cannot integrate them.  That is not necessarily true.  Systems that have Web service capabilities are fully capable of being integrated regardless of their location.  This was recently proven by a very successful hosted NetSuite to CATSWeb integration.  The requirement was to allow customer service to enter their initial customer complaint as a Support Case in NetSuite (which the customer runs as a SaaS) and have a corresponding transaction triggered in CATSWeb (which is also running as SaaS) where the actual complaint processing occurs.  This was all accomplished by using a simple call from NetSuite to the CATSWeb web service.  CATSWeb creates the record and sends a success or error message back to NetSuite, which then either stores the newly created CATSWeb Record ID in the Support Case for reference purposes or sends an email to an individual in the case of an error message.  Additionally, because CATSWeb returns the Record ID created to NetSuite, any further changes to the NetSuite Support Case can be sent to CATSWeb, which will update the record accordingly.

So is system integration of SaaS applications possible?  Absolutely. And depending the capabilities of the systems involved it can be relatively easy to accomplish.  CATSWeb offers a fully functional Web services API, which will allow any external system to integrate with it.  The location of the external system does not matter.  The bottom line is that Software as a Service is a viable business model which can greatly reduce IT costs and the idea that just because your applications are hosted at offsite locations is no reason why they cannot be effectively integrated.

In the IT world, there is ever that security pendulum that either seems to move toward ease of use or toward restrictive control.  Users typically tend towards the “ease of use” end of the spectrum because who wants to remember yet another password?  And who wants to install complicated VPN software or jump through extra authentication hoops? Conversely, IT folks (like me) tend to believe in restrictive control, in complicated passwords as possible, extra authentication hoops and logging everything that happens over an established connection.

With the advent of SaaS (Software as a Service), security becomes all the more critical in terms of both the user of the service and the administrator of the environment providing that service.  The beautiful thing about SaaS offerings like CATSWeb is that they are completely web based through HTML.  This makes life much easier for all parties.  From the user side, CATSWeb requires no special VPN software, nothing downloaded to the client computer and no local certificate store to verify a user’s identity  only  a web address and a password.  From the IT standpoint, all machines involved in providing CATSWeb SaaS are completely locked down to two ports of traffic; an IT dream come true.  Users will either be coming into a hosted CATSWeb environment via HTTP (port 80) or HTTPS (port 443). For securing a server to the world, only having to deal with two ports is about as simple a scenario as exists in the IT industry.

Because CATSWeb traffic is only on two ports, our servers are locked down completely, with those two ports being monitored constantly through the firewall, protected by live scanning anti-virus solutions and safeguarded by managed IDS (Intrusion Detection) systems.  Add to that all web traffic is logged from start to finish and you’ve got as bulletproof a server system as can be found.  And then we get to CATSWeb itself.

Within CATSWeb, AssurX has included additional security tools to ensure that your data is safe.  First, each customer company has their own unique, individual database not shared by anyone else. If a customer chooses to require SSL for accessing their CATSWeb database, this ensures that all traffic to and from that database is encrypted.  System access is automatically logged for easy review, including the IP address from where the traffic originated.

The rest we leave up to users.   I guess that’s where CATSWeb SaaS becomes a two-pendulum system. The “server security pendulum” we’ve chosen to swing as far toward restrictive control as possible.  The “user access pendulum” we leave to the users of CATSWeb.  An administrator in a CATSWeb system can set their own requirements for passwords for their users, establish their own session parameters such as session length and inactivity timeouts and much, much more.  This will allow any given SaaS CATSWeb system to have security anywhere along the user access pendulum, from easy to restrictive, based on what your requirements are.

And so it is with Information Technology.  No one knows for sure what it was originally called but it seems to have origins defined by its first name…or was its name defined by the origins?  In the mid-90’s, when it was more an idea than a practice, we called it simply “hosted software”. Many dismissed it as “future-talk” and speculation, thinking few would actually ever pay to “rent” software over the Internet. But those of us in the industry thought it was brilliant.  A “win-win”, if you will.  Software companies able to make continuous streams of income and consumer companies able to cut back IT costs and never have to worry about upgrades, hardware and the other nightmares of running a mission critical application.

In the late 90’s, it became known as ASP or “Application Service Provider” and the media had caught wind of something new.  To date, this was the most popular term coined and was the most widely used. There were over 20,000 mentions of ASP in the press in the year 2000. When we began offering CATSWeb OnDemand in 2000, we considered it an ASP offering and some of the internal (behind the scenes) components are still branded with the ASP nomenclature.  As ourselves users of ASP’s poster child Salesforce, we thought the model had great potential and it helped us tremendously when our IT department was in its adolescence.

Coined shortly after ASP around the early 2000’s, some in the industry heard the term SaaS or “Software as a Service”. By 2003 or so this term began to build popularity and momentum as the new buzzword for hosted software. In 2005 SaaS overtook ASP as the acronym of choice and in 2007 there was a peak of over 10,000 press mentions of SaaS.  The industry by-and-large still refers to hosted applications as SaaS. We consider CATSWeb OnDemand a SaaS application and refer to it as such currently.

Now there is a new buzzword on the horizon that is rapidly gaining popularity and serves to define the newest generation of hosted applications: “cloud-computing” or simply “cloud”.  Cloud is basically the same business model, the same pros and cons and the same major players, like Salesforce and WebEx among many others. Same old idea, shiny new name.  And if history is any indication, we’ll see “cloud” gain in popularity until it peaks and another new term is coined to define this industry niche.

I guess the bottom line in all of this is that AssurX has a strong, time-tested, customer-proven hosted offering in our CATSWeb OnDemand product.  And frankly, we don’t care whether it’s referred to as “hosted software”, ASP, SaaS, cloud computing or the next new thing, whatever that may be.  We still intend to offer our software for customer use over the Internet for as long as people want to use it that way.  We will always strive to better our offerings, our uptime, our security and our reputation in this hosted model and be frontrunners in providing the best features and reliability with the best dollar for dollar value in the industry.

“Hosted software by any other name, would still accomplish the same”.

In the IT world, there is ever that security pendulum that either seems to move toward ease of use or toward restrictive control.  Users typically tend towards the “ease of use” end of the spectrum because who wants to remember yet another password?  And who wants to install complicated VPN software or jump through extra authentication hoops? Conversely, IT folks (like me) tend to believe in restrictive control, in complicated passwords as possible, extra authentication hoops and logging everything that happens over an established connection.

With the advent of SaaS (Software as a Service), security becomes all the more critical in terms of both the user of the service and the administrator of the environment providing that service.  The beautiful thing about SaaS offerings like CATSWeb is that they are completely web based through HTML.  This makes life much easier for all parties.  From the user side, CATSWeb requires no special VPN software, nothing downloaded to the client computer and no local certificate store to verify a user’s identity ­ only  a web address and a password.  From the IT standpoint, all machines involved in providing CATSWeb SaaS are completely locked down to two ports of traffic; an IT dream come true.  Users will either be coming into a hosted CATSWeb environment via HTTP (port 80) or HTTPS (port 443). For securing a server to the world, only having to deal with two ports is about as simple a scenario as exists in the IT industry.

Because CATSWeb traffic is only on two ports, our servers are locked down completely, with those two ports being monitored constantly through the firewall, protected by live scanning anti-virus solutions and safeguarded by managed IDS (Intrusion Detection) systems.  Add to that all web traffic is logged from start to finish and you’ve got as bulletproof a server system as can be found.  And then we get to CATSWeb itself.

Within CATSWeb, AssurX has included additional security tools to ensure that your data is safe.  First, each customer company has their own unique, individual database not shared by anyone else. If a customer chooses to require SSL for accessing their CATSWeb database, this ensures that all traffic to and from that database is encrypted.  System access is automatically logged for easy review, including the IP address from where the traffic originated.

The rest we leave up to users.   I guess that’s where CATSWeb SaaS becomes a two-pendulum system. The “server security pendulum” we’ve chosen to swing as far toward restrictive control as possible.  The “user access pendulum” we leave to the users of CATSWeb.  An administrator in a CATSWeb system can set their own requirements for passwords for their users, establish their own session parameters such as session length and inactivity timeouts and much, much more.  This will allow any given SaaS CATSWeb system to have security anywhere along the user access pendulum, from easy to restrictive, based on what your requirements are.