This blog is filled with acronyms and tech terms. To help guide you through them, I’ve come up with a handy list of frequently used acronyms and tech terms and their meaning.

Cloud Computing: Using servers hosted on the Internet for computational purposes.  Cloud computing vendors build Internet accessible data centers and sell computing time to customers.  Typically customers deploy virtualized OS images onto cloud vendor servers.

CMS: Content Management System.

Extranet: Generally refers to a company-owned web application that is accessible to users outside of the company firewall.  Usually an extension of the company Intranet.

FUD: Fear, uncertainty and doubt.  People usually use FUD to dissuade others from a particular point of view or opinion.

Intranet: A web site that is only accessible from inside a company or organization.

KPI: Key Performance Indicator.  A metric used to determine the overall health of a system, application or initiative.

PRD: Product Requirements Document.  These documents outline the use cases, features and requirements for a product.  Software PRDs also include details about packaging, licensing, product quality and performance.

QA: Quality Assurance.

RFP: Request for Proposal.  RFPs are usually multi-page documents that contain questions for software vendors.  Companies typically send RFP documents to multiple vendors and compare answers.  Often times RFP questions aren’t even produced by the requesting company themselves, and are instead a long list of checklist items found on a template.

ROI: Return on Investment.  With business software, ROI represents the impact to a companies’ financial balance sheet, whether it be an increase in sales revenue, decrease in operating cost, or decrease in manufacturing or other types of expenses.

SAML: Security Assertion Markup Language.

SaaS: Software as a Service.

SOA: Service Oriented Architecture.

Wiki: A web application that allows any participant to update the page from the browser using simple text-based formatting.

XACML: eXtensible Access Control Markup Language.