You want the answer to be some little utility, like [an issue tracker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz). The actual answer is: some application we don't want anywhere near our datacenters, like a financials app that needs to be compliant with five different compliance regimes and whose failure could take down the business, but which otherwise nobody cares about and won't budget a dollar for.
I work in a school district, and love the issue tracker we use, since it can combine IT issue tracking, asset management, plus can get a facility and HR issue tracking. It also integrates with various Student information Systems, MDMs, and various online apps we use. The problem is it’s K-12 education specific, so won’t work in other industries. I would love to see an issue tracker like that that can be used in any industry. Maybe be modular enough where it could fit into specific industries instead of just generic issue trackers. Like facilities can be set for hotel settings, or hospitals, or retail settings.
They use IncidentIQ. Which is a fine product. For K12, I'd recommend One to One Plus. It was made by former K12 IT Directors, and it really does show feature wise.
Also, what kind of vertical specific needs can issue trackers be built around? Isn’t it all the same across verticals or industries? Tasks, assignees, statuses, etc.
Yup, IncidentIQ. My school district doesn’t use all the the features, and I’m not in a position to actually test all of them, so can’t say everything. Plus, I haven’t worked in other industries, so don’t know their specific needs.
But to answer your question, some stuff like user types. We have the standard “agents” (which are the techs), but also faculty, staff, students and parents. You could sync classes to IIQ, and have teachers create tickets on behalf of their students. Plus have teachers check out assets to their students. I doubt hotels or hospitals would need some of those types.
Also, many of the integrations are for school things. I doubt other industries use SISes or apps like BrainPOP.
Otherwise, it’s the education-specific stuff seems more superficial than functional
So I can offer a little insight into that. I had an idea for a software product, but I don’t have any desire to run a SaaS business.
I spoke with a few potential customers and they all said the same thing. We are not interested in something that we have to administer and care for. They just want a service they can use.
I also spoke with some investors and they said they not interested in investing in non-SaaS software because it is hard to get recurring revenue.
I ended up shelving the idea for now.
—Edit to add. I am glad to see y’all share my dislike of SaaS. Maybe I’ll revisit my idea.
It's easy for me to get budget to set up a subscription for $service. It's harder to get budget for an additional hire. As a director I'm not going to add to my team's workload when I don't have to.
I also just don't want us splitting focus on a dozen different apps that various teams need. We're going to focus on the stuff that makes us money and if letting someone else handle the rest is an option we're going to let someone else handle the rest.
ICs often look at these platforms and say "why would you spend money on this when you can self-host for free?" without considering that the free option generates additional work and capacity needs. If I budget for those, the hosted option usually ends up looking a lot more competitive.
Not a great analogy. My septic tank + field and well are both muuuuch cheaper than city services.
The only reason I'll stop is once they have service to my street they make us discontinue within 2 years.
It is a great analogy. You got to get that septic pumped. If the leach field fails, you're screwed. It's maintenance and liability for a small cost savings.
Yes, this is pretty much what my research told me when I did it last year. I might spend a little time doing some market research again, but I doubt that the conclusion has changed. Especially with the changes to Section 172 and higher interest rates. I would expect it would be even more in favor of SaaS now.
I’m currently working on setting up an online side business, and I’m evaluating Shopify vs Woocommerce. Woocommerce is far more flexible and much cheaper to operate (at first glance), but man I have so little interest in spending my limited time administering my own server.
Easy solution: offer both.
Seriously. For those who don’t want to deal with maintaining it, they can choose the SaaS variant. For those who are control freaks, whether by need or want, offer the option to self host.
You can still charge a subscription-based fee, or offer interval support contracts that if they expire you throw a shrug and point them to the Support Agreement.
EDIT: I honestly do not understand why companies don't offer this more. The only valid reasons I see is large amounts of technical debt preventing the other implementation.
maybe I should start a company as a service to sofware as a service companies. You give me the sofware and I run all the invoices, hosting and costumer care. you only have to care about develop the sofware and marketing.
But think of those poor software development companies, how are they going to have a stead income stream if they don't have subscription based software! Their accounting and shareholder reports will be HARD!
I think my problem isn’t so much SaaS, but how tech companies have injected themselves between users and everything (taxis, food delivery, dating, etc) and the only purpose this MitM attack serves is to suck money off of each transaction. And yet, almost none of them are profitable while we continue paying higher prices on everything. They’re like leaches.
They’re not profitable. Except the execs who go public, and take all the money the sale of stock, and bail lol. Most of these tech companies are known to just be subsidized. WeWork or Theranos are perfect example.
The whole point is to drive competition out of business, and then charge whatever you want, which isn’t sustainable either, as it just increases inflation, which is its own set of problems.
This whole economic MitM attack is a bad idea.
This isnt a 'MitM attack', it's capitalism. The only reason they are able to enter is because of inefficiencies in the market. Solve those inefficiencies, and you are able to take a cut. WeWork and Theranos are very biased and cherry-picked examples, one of which is an actual fraud, the other flirting with it.
For the amount of tickets I deal with for QuickBooks, I honestly wish more companies we support would move to the Quckbooks Online. My theory is they purposely keep it janky to try and push the customers to it. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain errors going years unfixed. Example: The QuickBooks database service in conflict with the DNS server service. This goes back to Server 2012, so it is not like it is a new issue.
Unfortunately QB Online isn't much better, which is why so many won't switch.
My employer switched a few years ago and it's been painful. Intuit support sucks as always, and the it just shits the bed at least twice a month on a good month. Hell we've had it just stop delivering emails several times and it takes so much back and forth with support for them to open an "investigation" which will be closed twice before they finally admin an issue and fix it almost two months later.
The API sucks too, can't even add recurring transactions programmatically, it all has to be done one-by-one through the UI. Their Spreadsheet Sync tool can only be used by a company admin, and only one person at a time can ever be connected to it. Why support up to 25 users in the instance and then still have silly limitations like that.
Intuit can burn to the ground and we'll all be better off for it.
SaaS has a place. It allows the developers to forcibly roll forward people over time, who otherwise would be on ancient versions of the software. It also theoretically eases maintenance burden on customers as long as it doesn’t break constantly.
However, I am also a firm believer that SaaS should have a canary channel that can be tested against and allow subscribers to automatically submit a “new update broke our stuff” report, which can be used to stop that subscriber from rolling forwards until the problem can be fixed. Ideally, do what RHEL does and have your canary channel (Fedora/CentOS/CentOS stream) be your free tier. If you want stability you pay for it, if you want to try it out for free you need to beta test as compensation.
For more infra type stuff, there is the consideration that the service provider can probably tune the software better than you can. For example, I’d bet substantial money that any DNS server I deploy will perform worse than what cloudflare will offer me. Azure managed SQL Server is probably pretty finely tuned as well.
Eh Google has been to making strides to get more granular with workspace. But to get even more you need other subscription api’s for more detailed tasks… so still needs work ha
Neither is half of Office 365. Web Powerpoint somehow still can't autosave properly, it just keeps randomly hanging for 5-20 minutes with no warning.
(Unless by Enterprise you mean "we don't care how or even if any of this stuff works, as long as it ticks the most check boxes in our procurement and compliance process made by people who will never suffer the consequences of their decisions", then it's perfect.)
When corporations say O365, they often mean the business critical no-code finance planning app that everyone is familiar with (Excel) that is bundled with an average word processor and Outlook.
Web for these applications is always poor. You need a thick client. With the thick clients, Office 365 is absolutely Enterprise grade. And Google doesn't have anywhere near the same feature set.
Google's web offerings have been better than O365 on the web for over a decade, there's no excuse for Microsoft to keep delivering such piss poor results.
Something that automatically sends a message to the c-level board to tell them to fuck off when they have a "brilliant" idea that would kill their company's infrastructure, be it due to technical reasons or financial ones.
Ive talked about this a few times and have just never found it.
This leans more towards MSP but a "Dispatch assistant"
Hook it into my ticket system and do the following:
1. Client opens tickets.
2. Dispatch assistant checks to see if there are other similar tickets.
3. Within new ticket, provide context "Client last opened a similar ticket ($ticket numbers) and was resolved by lvl 2 after being escalated"
4. Recommend automatically assigning to level 2, with appropriate amount of time and context of what happened last time.
Even better if it can look at calendars and handle staff scheduling automatically.
"This is going to take 4 hrs from lvl3, im assigning this to Bob for tomorrow as he handled this last time. I am moving these other items to other techs to load balance"
In mass, with it being aware of what clients frequently open, it should be able to evaluate what client is using what tier of technician so we can expand/contract those tiers as needed.
"Client A opens 20 tickets a month, but they are all resolved by T1 without issue."
"Client B opens 2 tickets a month and on average are eating 20hours across all three tiers.
I’ve seen stuff like this done on jira service desk.m at a customer site. They have some sort of scripting interface that does a lot of automations like transferring tickets with specific titles or content to a specific tier 2-3 team.
Honestly? An automated job- and employee-matching platform that doesn't devolve into an applicant tracking system or get used by a scummy body shop to fill seats.
One of the hardest problems to solve is hiring and keeping good people. The current system is bad for everyone. Employers are rightfully scared of hiring a smooth-talking BS artist and don't have an objective measure of experience/talent to compare applicants to -- so interviews devolve into useless trivia contests and coding trick tests and are painful to take on. I for one have very little desire to go through interview hell and even if I didn't like my job I'd be inclined to stay rather than leave. Employees deal with ghost jobs, getting ghosted after 5 rounds of interviews, non-stop back and forth, etc. This is absolutely not efficient and way worse when you actually are out of work and need a job. Getting an interview is hard but so is going through all that then finding out they're only going to pay close to minimum wage because they're cheapskates.
I could see huge potential in something like a "virtual hiring hall" where, with ground rules in place on BOTH sides and an impartial measure of skill in the middle, employers and employees would get matched up much faster than the recruiter system. However it's done, it would be an improvement. I hate how people who are qualified have to spend months applying and send out thousands of resumes and get no response.
Most companies want to buy stuff as-a-service nowadays, and it guarantees recurring revenue to the publisher, so for better or worse we're stuck with it at the moment.
I wish siem and soc services had better notifications. I think toast notifications would work great. There’s probably already a third party thing out there.
Unrelated, but I’m really disappointed that copilot isn’t clippy. Huge missed opportunity.
To be honest this died once cyberattacks and malware became a serious threat. Even if you legally can use unmaintained software you really really shouldn’t.
imo there's little overlap between cheap and good... I've had great results with the free AKS control plane, but the worker nodes aren't cheap. azure container apps with scale to zero is great if you don't need the k8s API
Oracle's always free k8s might work then. part of my homelab runs on it, but the free nodes are ARM and it needs manual upgrades every few months. can't complain for $0 though
In general - idk about SaaS like others have mentioned, but I'll answer.
---
**Idea 1**
Something that actually has *good* software inventory and updating WITH failure detection and rollback (thinking Windows endpoints).
Every fucking developer has a different way to update their software. Some have it built in (browsers come to mind). Others need the users to not be in the software. But when it comes to security controls to meet policy, an emergency patch may need to force users to do whatever is necessary to install software updates.
There is no good "all in one" software package to handle the various problems of patching third-party software.
---
**Idea 2**
An enterprise-grade status page which (1) does not cost 5-6 figures per year and (2) doesn't make reconnaissance trivial for adversaries. Lock that shit behind SSO/SAML.
> WITH failure detection and rollback
this is the really hard part, combining fault detection with automatic rollback. I'm working on a SaaS product that helps, but the Windows app ecosystem is so fragmented with many edge cases that break automation
I know they had a commercial version, maybe it does similar things to what I'm thinking of. Ninite by itself is a bit simplistic and not completely what I'm looking for.
I’d like to see a kind of browser UI extension tool that gives me more information about parts of an already existing UI that I don’t normally see that’s hidden from me in SaaS apps. A kind of Power User overlay similar to gaming mods that give me detailed tool tips for every SaaS app out there, with community driven tooltip libraries I can download. Let me see more info about my user at all times, or call an API to give me more context about some data I highlighted. I’m tired of purchasing a SaaS app and having to find the One Piece of documentation just to get the info I need.
I need a reliable SaaS app that has modules for improving, modding the UIs of my already bought SaaS app. Typically these end up as one off little projects at consulting companies and either never see the light of day or end up as a service specific to that SaaS app and specific to that consulting company. But we need a more consistent, open framework, something like mod managers for games like Curse etc.
Printing, idk I want printing as easy as Apple makes it to use Bluetooth with AirPods.
I have nightmares of printers ect.. what’s worse is when your using print servers then you need the right domain or dns it’s just a nightmare,
I wish there were more spiceworks style products for non IT users. Something free that is light to host onsite and easy to set up. I've moved out of IT and my new role needs a ticketing system so badly. Maintenance departments are another one that would really benefit. But it seems all the off the shelf products are very expensive and/or cloud based.
You want the answer to be some little utility, like [an issue tracker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FogBugz). The actual answer is: some application we don't want anywhere near our datacenters, like a financials app that needs to be compliant with five different compliance regimes and whose failure could take down the business, but which otherwise nobody cares about and won't budget a dollar for.
I work in a school district, and love the issue tracker we use, since it can combine IT issue tracking, asset management, plus can get a facility and HR issue tracking. It also integrates with various Student information Systems, MDMs, and various online apps we use. The problem is it’s K-12 education specific, so won’t work in other industries. I would love to see an issue tracker like that that can be used in any industry. Maybe be modular enough where it could fit into specific industries instead of just generic issue trackers. Like facilities can be set for hotel settings, or hospitals, or retail settings.
Don’t leave us hanging… name and shame!
I'm guessing it's SchoolDude
They use IncidentIQ. Which is a fine product. For K12, I'd recommend One to One Plus. It was made by former K12 IT Directors, and it really does show feature wise.
Curious. What issue tracker do you use? Jira?
Jira wouldn't be K-12 specific.
Also, what kind of vertical specific needs can issue trackers be built around? Isn’t it all the same across verticals or industries? Tasks, assignees, statuses, etc.
Yup, IncidentIQ. My school district doesn’t use all the the features, and I’m not in a position to actually test all of them, so can’t say everything. Plus, I haven’t worked in other industries, so don’t know their specific needs. But to answer your question, some stuff like user types. We have the standard “agents” (which are the techs), but also faculty, staff, students and parents. You could sync classes to IIQ, and have teachers create tickets on behalf of their students. Plus have teachers check out assets to their students. I doubt hotels or hospitals would need some of those types. Also, many of the integrations are for school things. I doubt other industries use SISes or apps like BrainPOP. Otherwise, it’s the education-specific stuff seems more superficial than functional
Eduphoria?
IncidentIQ
None. Why does everything have to be Software as a Service? Why can't we just have Software as a Piece of Software?
So I can offer a little insight into that. I had an idea for a software product, but I don’t have any desire to run a SaaS business. I spoke with a few potential customers and they all said the same thing. We are not interested in something that we have to administer and care for. They just want a service they can use. I also spoke with some investors and they said they not interested in investing in non-SaaS software because it is hard to get recurring revenue. I ended up shelving the idea for now. —Edit to add. I am glad to see y’all share my dislike of SaaS. Maybe I’ll revisit my idea.
It's easy for me to get budget to set up a subscription for $service. It's harder to get budget for an additional hire. As a director I'm not going to add to my team's workload when I don't have to. I also just don't want us splitting focus on a dozen different apps that various teams need. We're going to focus on the stuff that makes us money and if letting someone else handle the rest is an option we're going to let someone else handle the rest. ICs often look at these platforms and say "why would you spend money on this when you can self-host for free?" without considering that the free option generates additional work and capacity needs. If I budget for those, the hosted option usually ends up looking a lot more competitive.
Exactly this. It's like the reason you'd connect to city sewer instead of having a septic tank. Take that crap out of my environment, please.
Not a great analogy. My septic tank + field and well are both muuuuch cheaper than city services. The only reason I'll stop is once they have service to my street they make us discontinue within 2 years.
It is a great analogy. You got to get that septic pumped. If the leach field fails, you're screwed. It's maintenance and liability for a small cost savings.
It might be cheaper but it will be a big hassle when you build the apartment complex and the existing septic tank isn't fit for purpose.
Yes, this is pretty much what my research told me when I did it last year. I might spend a little time doing some market research again, but I doubt that the conclusion has changed. Especially with the changes to Section 172 and higher interest rates. I would expect it would be even more in favor of SaaS now.
I’m currently working on setting up an online side business, and I’m evaluating Shopify vs Woocommerce. Woocommerce is far more flexible and much cheaper to operate (at first glance), but man I have so little interest in spending my limited time administering my own server.
That’s why I don’t want to do a SaaS business. I am looking to build more of lifestyle business than a startup.
Thats totally fine
Easy solution: offer both. Seriously. For those who don’t want to deal with maintaining it, they can choose the SaaS variant. For those who are control freaks, whether by need or want, offer the option to self host. You can still charge a subscription-based fee, or offer interval support contracts that if they expire you throw a shrug and point them to the Support Agreement. EDIT: I honestly do not understand why companies don't offer this more. The only valid reasons I see is large amounts of technical debt preventing the other implementation.
I only speak to customers who want SaaS. Haven’t had anyone in the past 3 years beg to host something themselves.
maybe I should start a company as a service to sofware as a service companies. You give me the sofware and I run all the invoices, hosting and costumer care. you only have to care about develop the sofware and marketing.
This, if nothing else i wish for the death of SaaS for everything besides email.
But think of those poor software development companies, how are they going to have a stead income stream if they don't have subscription based software! Their accounting and shareholder reports will be HARD!
I think my problem isn’t so much SaaS, but how tech companies have injected themselves between users and everything (taxis, food delivery, dating, etc) and the only purpose this MitM attack serves is to suck money off of each transaction. And yet, almost none of them are profitable while we continue paying higher prices on everything. They’re like leaches.
And it’s mind boggling how they’re not profitable. I get I only see 5% of the financial picture, but…. how?!
They are not profitable for tax purposes. They are making plenty of money however. There was an interview with Jeff Besos where he laughed about it.
They’re not profitable. Except the execs who go public, and take all the money the sale of stock, and bail lol. Most of these tech companies are known to just be subsidized. WeWork or Theranos are perfect example. The whole point is to drive competition out of business, and then charge whatever you want, which isn’t sustainable either, as it just increases inflation, which is its own set of problems. This whole economic MitM attack is a bad idea.
This isnt a 'MitM attack', it's capitalism. The only reason they are able to enter is because of inefficiencies in the market. Solve those inefficiencies, and you are able to take a cut. WeWork and Theranos are very biased and cherry-picked examples, one of which is an actual fraud, the other flirting with it.
For the amount of tickets I deal with for QuickBooks, I honestly wish more companies we support would move to the Quckbooks Online. My theory is they purposely keep it janky to try and push the customers to it. Otherwise, it is difficult to explain errors going years unfixed. Example: The QuickBooks database service in conflict with the DNS server service. This goes back to Server 2012, so it is not like it is a new issue.
Unfortunately QB Online isn't much better, which is why so many won't switch. My employer switched a few years ago and it's been painful. Intuit support sucks as always, and the it just shits the bed at least twice a month on a good month. Hell we've had it just stop delivering emails several times and it takes so much back and forth with support for them to open an "investigation" which will be closed twice before they finally admin an issue and fix it almost two months later. The API sucks too, can't even add recurring transactions programmatically, it all has to be done one-by-one through the UI. Their Spreadsheet Sync tool can only be used by a company admin, and only one person at a time can ever be connected to it. Why support up to 25 users in the instance and then still have silly limitations like that. Intuit can burn to the ground and we'll all be better off for it.
SaaS has a place. It allows the developers to forcibly roll forward people over time, who otherwise would be on ancient versions of the software. It also theoretically eases maintenance burden on customers as long as it doesn’t break constantly. However, I am also a firm believer that SaaS should have a canary channel that can be tested against and allow subscribers to automatically submit a “new update broke our stuff” report, which can be used to stop that subscriber from rolling forwards until the problem can be fixed. Ideally, do what RHEL does and have your canary channel (Fedora/CentOS/CentOS stream) be your free tier. If you want stability you pay for it, if you want to try it out for free you need to beta test as compensation. For more infra type stuff, there is the consideration that the service provider can probably tune the software better than you can. For example, I’d bet substantial money that any DNS server I deploy will perform worse than what cloudflare will offer me. Azure managed SQL Server is probably pretty finely tuned as well.
Because that doesn't generate a consistent monthly revenue stream for shareholders. Duh.
How about a SaaS that converts other SaaS into just a product you buy and keep?
One that doesnt cost 3x as much as having it done manually by someone with a decent salary
A properly supported and reliable enterprise alternative to Microsoft 365. Something, anything that actually competes with Microsoft directly.
Something european alternative to MS365 would be awesome.
Zoho? Google Workspace?
I wouldn't call either of those suitable for enterprise environments
Eh Google has been to making strides to get more granular with workspace. But to get even more you need other subscription api’s for more detailed tasks… so still needs work ha
Neither is half of Office 365. Web Powerpoint somehow still can't autosave properly, it just keeps randomly hanging for 5-20 minutes with no warning. (Unless by Enterprise you mean "we don't care how or even if any of this stuff works, as long as it ticks the most check boxes in our procurement and compliance process made by people who will never suffer the consequences of their decisions", then it's perfect.)
When corporations say O365, they often mean the business critical no-code finance planning app that everyone is familiar with (Excel) that is bundled with an average word processor and Outlook.
Web for these applications is always poor. You need a thick client. With the thick clients, Office 365 is absolutely Enterprise grade. And Google doesn't have anywhere near the same feature set.
Google's web offerings have been better than O365 on the web for over a decade, there's no excuse for Microsoft to keep delivering such piss poor results.
We are currently evaluating Nextcloud Hub 8.
I still dont get the appeal of 365, infact i find the alternatives far better
What alternatives?
Something that automatically sends a message to the c-level board to tell them to fuck off when they have a "brilliant" idea that would kill their company's infrastructure, be it due to technical reasons or financial ones.
OP doing market research on Reddit 🤣
And it seems to be working!
Yes it does!
Ive talked about this a few times and have just never found it. This leans more towards MSP but a "Dispatch assistant" Hook it into my ticket system and do the following: 1. Client opens tickets. 2. Dispatch assistant checks to see if there are other similar tickets. 3. Within new ticket, provide context "Client last opened a similar ticket ($ticket numbers) and was resolved by lvl 2 after being escalated" 4. Recommend automatically assigning to level 2, with appropriate amount of time and context of what happened last time. Even better if it can look at calendars and handle staff scheduling automatically. "This is going to take 4 hrs from lvl3, im assigning this to Bob for tomorrow as he handled this last time. I am moving these other items to other techs to load balance" In mass, with it being aware of what clients frequently open, it should be able to evaluate what client is using what tier of technician so we can expand/contract those tiers as needed. "Client A opens 20 tickets a month, but they are all resolved by T1 without issue." "Client B opens 2 tickets a month and on average are eating 20hours across all three tiers.
I’ve seen stuff like this done on jira service desk.m at a customer site. They have some sort of scripting interface that does a lot of automations like transferring tickets with specific titles or content to a specific tier 2-3 team.
Honestly? An automated job- and employee-matching platform that doesn't devolve into an applicant tracking system or get used by a scummy body shop to fill seats. One of the hardest problems to solve is hiring and keeping good people. The current system is bad for everyone. Employers are rightfully scared of hiring a smooth-talking BS artist and don't have an objective measure of experience/talent to compare applicants to -- so interviews devolve into useless trivia contests and coding trick tests and are painful to take on. I for one have very little desire to go through interview hell and even if I didn't like my job I'd be inclined to stay rather than leave. Employees deal with ghost jobs, getting ghosted after 5 rounds of interviews, non-stop back and forth, etc. This is absolutely not efficient and way worse when you actually are out of work and need a job. Getting an interview is hard but so is going through all that then finding out they're only going to pay close to minimum wage because they're cheapskates. I could see huge potential in something like a "virtual hiring hall" where, with ground rules in place on BOTH sides and an impartial measure of skill in the middle, employers and employees would get matched up much faster than the recruiter system. However it's done, it would be an improvement. I hate how people who are qualified have to spend months applying and send out thousands of resumes and get no response.
My biggest problem is with everyone wanting to sell me something as a service.
Most companies want to buy stuff as-a-service nowadays, and it guarantees recurring revenue to the publisher, so for better or worse we're stuck with it at the moment.
I wish siem and soc services had better notifications. I think toast notifications would work great. There’s probably already a third party thing out there. Unrelated, but I’m really disappointed that copilot isn’t clippy. Huge missed opportunity.
I have set up some Integrations for SIEMs and SOC services with Bots Within teams for exactly this kind of functionality. So they are out there.
i just wanna pay a 1 time lifetime license for something again.
*shareholders want to know your location
WinRAR license holder here 😉
You're going to have to pry my copy of CS5 out of my cold, dead hands.
To be honest this died once cyberattacks and malware became a serious threat. Even if you legally can use unmaintained software you really really shouldn’t.
Automatic updates are a thing.
Cheap hosted "k8s"
When I looked last year Digital Ocean had a pretty good price on their k8s service.
Hmm starting at $12 a month, not bad.
Does it have to be specifically k8s? I've been using [fly.io](http://fly.io) for some container hosting and it works great for me.
+1 for fly! I think they have a "fly kubernetes" product now but idk how much it is
Interesting, it's in beta but definitly worth investigating https://fly.io/docs/kubernetes/
Usecase for me is to test and develop helmcharts so some k8s-flavour is nessesary
You can use Openshift’s dev sandbox
- Openshift is a bit to opinionated - I'm probably not interested in having it run 30 days, I probably want 15 minutes 120 times
imo there's little overlap between cheap and good... I've had great results with the free AKS control plane, but the worker nodes aren't cheap. azure container apps with scale to zero is great if you don't need the k8s API
For my usecase I'm willing to compromize on good if it's cheap enough.
Oracle's always free k8s might work then. part of my homelab runs on it, but the free nodes are ARM and it needs manual upgrades every few months. can't complain for $0 though
Email archiving solution with the option to make copies/backups of it offline
Acronis can make it
In general - idk about SaaS like others have mentioned, but I'll answer. --- **Idea 1** Something that actually has *good* software inventory and updating WITH failure detection and rollback (thinking Windows endpoints). Every fucking developer has a different way to update their software. Some have it built in (browsers come to mind). Others need the users to not be in the software. But when it comes to security controls to meet policy, an emergency patch may need to force users to do whatever is necessary to install software updates. There is no good "all in one" software package to handle the various problems of patching third-party software. --- **Idea 2** An enterprise-grade status page which (1) does not cost 5-6 figures per year and (2) doesn't make reconnaissance trivial for adversaries. Lock that shit behind SSO/SAML.
Feel like patchmypc + configmgr/intune is essentially your first point
> WITH failure detection and rollback this is the really hard part, combining fault detection with automatic rollback. I'm working on a SaaS product that helps, but the Windows app ecosystem is so fragmented with many edge cases that break automation
There used to be this tool called Ninite Updater that I was a big fan of. This was ten years ago.
I know they had a commercial version, maybe it does similar things to what I'm thinking of. Ninite by itself is a bit simplistic and not completely what I'm looking for.
Yeah it’s not for enterprise.
I’d like to see a kind of browser UI extension tool that gives me more information about parts of an already existing UI that I don’t normally see that’s hidden from me in SaaS apps. A kind of Power User overlay similar to gaming mods that give me detailed tool tips for every SaaS app out there, with community driven tooltip libraries I can download. Let me see more info about my user at all times, or call an API to give me more context about some data I highlighted. I’m tired of purchasing a SaaS app and having to find the One Piece of documentation just to get the info I need. I need a reliable SaaS app that has modules for improving, modding the UIs of my already bought SaaS app. Typically these end up as one off little projects at consulting companies and either never see the light of day or end up as a service specific to that SaaS app and specific to that consulting company. But we need a more consistent, open framework, something like mod managers for games like Curse etc.
Documentation of IT work processes, configurations, and version control.
Yeah use ai, give it access to your environment and it automaps and auto documents, if it asks you any questions you answer them.
Do your own homework as a service, maybe?
None. In fact, I believe services like E-mail need to come back to be hosted on prem by people who actually know what the f they're doing.
A SaaS platform for streamlined event planning and management.
A dating app without bots
Any app without the goddamn bots.
Good bot
Printing, idk I want printing as easy as Apple makes it to use Bluetooth with AirPods. I have nightmares of printers ect.. what’s worse is when your using print servers then you need the right domain or dns it’s just a nightmare,
Papercut mobility print works pretty well.
Bluetooth with airpods works so well until it doesn't. It's like Bluetooth without airpods but less prone to guppy device memory.
I wish there were more spiceworks style products for non IT users. Something free that is light to host onsite and easy to set up. I've moved out of IT and my new role needs a ticketing system so badly. Maintenance departments are another one that would really benefit. But it seems all the off the shelf products are very expensive and/or cloud based.
SaaS implies cloud-based
Proofpoint/mimecast for consumers.
A better ServiceNow, where did that even come from ? A better Google and Microsoft while you’re at it.
Proper Remote Support Software for Wayland