ASP does it work? (April 2000)
Feedback from ASP users outside of the oil industry suggests that there are pitfalls in browser access to hosted applications. The problem is not just one of bandwidth - as the editorial staff of Sm@rt Reseller found.IT trade mag Sm@rt Reseller tried outsourcing its email with a New York-based ASP that hosts e-mail and other applications. Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports that despite the providers enthusiasm, ASP did not work as advertised. The problems seem to have come from the interface with Lotus Notes. Vaughn-Nichols reported that reading messages was as slow as running a marathon on crutches. Worse, the ASP client lacked essential features such as spell-checking, cutting and pasting and login and password use was awkward.
painfully slow
Sm@rt Resellers advice to Notes-based ASPs is to stick with the native Notes client, because Lotus' Java-based browser client was painfully slow on even our fastest 500MHz Pentium III with 128MB of RAM and T1 connections to the Internet.