Recently Krishnan Subramanian and I were talking about writing a series of whitepapers as a guide for organizations looking to adopt technology - there''s many highly technical documents on offer but something worded more as a "10 easy steps" type series was what we envisaged for this particular offering. To use the term coined by another commentator in this space - we''re looking to be the advocates for the users of this stuff.

Fortuitously we both met up with MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson at the defrag conference in May and we mentioned to him what we were looking at doing. He saw the value in our approach and agreed to support us in the writing of our first paper which looks at the key things that prospective buyers of collaboration software need to ask.

The ten questions are detailed below:

• Is your product extensible to meet the changing face of the collaboration landscape?
• Does Your Product Support Standard Governance Frameworks?
• Does Your Collaboration Product Integrate with My Existing Technology Landscape?
• How Does Your Product Support Access Standards?
• How Flexible Are Your Data Location Requirements?
• How Does Your Product Administer Security?
• Is Your Product Standards Compliant?
• Can Your Product Scale With Our Planned Adoption Rates?
• How Robust Is Your Solution?
• How Viable Is Your Business Model?

You can download the whitepaper in full here. Thanks to MindTouch for supporting the creation of this paper and if you''d like to talk about ways we can help clarify what customers really need to think about when it comes to SaaS, Cloud, Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 generally, feel free to get in touch.