Explaining SaaS for Enterprise: The difference between friending your BFF and your Mom

As was mentioned last installment, one of the primary benefits of adopting SaaS for enterprise involves the ability to connect from any device that can access the internet. On Facebook this means that you can stay connected to someone you met on vacation and in the enterprise space this means that you can connect and collaborate regardless of distance.

Of course the first thing to note is that just because you can share doesn’t mean you should. This is clearly true regardless of context and in Facebook this is manifested in your privacy settings. Specifically you can choose to share posts with i) friends ii) friends of friends iii) everyone and you can even pick and choose groups or individual contacts to share with. So even if you do friend your mom, you can control what they see.

In enterprise this is manifested with roles and permissions. In the case of Facebook, the only role is friend and it’s up to the individual users to define what a friend is on a case by case basis (or by grouping them accordingly). Because of the demands of business, SmartSimple Software’s platform offers a great deal more flexibility in defining roles and access, all of which is always based on any meaningful criteria. But the concept is the same, for instance our clients are able to assign specific roles with varying permissions to their employees and extended communities alike.

Here are a few examples:

Market	Potential Roles	Defining Features
Independent Medical Examiners	·         Administrative Staff	·         Can see everything related to scheduling and billing ·         Can see patients contact information but not medical record
	·         External Health Care Associates	·         Can see medical record of clients that they are treating/assessing ·         Cannot see anything related to scheduling or billing
	·         Insurance Adjusters	·         Can only access information that is directly related to a specific claim for a specific client
Grant Makers	·         Applicants	·         Can only see information relating to their requests for funding
	·         Reviewers	·         Can only see applications that they are reviewing
	·         Grant Managers	·         Can see all administrative information

The major benefit of creating roles and permissions is that it allows for an organization to store all data in a central place. A few years ago this type of data would be stored on designated drives where individual employees were given access.  With role based permissions the silos are not black and white all or nothing, SmartSimple’s platform allows for companies to share some of their data, to some of their community some of the time, all of which is defined by their unique context.