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I seem to recall there are already web-based office suites available - Hyperoffice comes to mind as one...

Microsoft announced they were going to provide Office through the Internet back in 1999 . I think it was called "Microsoft Office Online", but MS seems to have decided to use that name for a simple homepage about Office. I actually recall inadvertently running into a web page that was a web-based version of Outlook that ran through Internet Explorer years ago. It was sluggish, using DHTML for the GUI, although it looked identical to the desktop version.

I think Microsoft was doing this as a response to websites like HyperOffice that were cropping up at the time. I remember these sites were referred to as "Application Service Providers", although the definition of that term seems to have changed. I recall several but the sites don't seem to be up anymore. They were websites that provided a window manager within a browser. One was Desktop.com and another was Blox.com. Yahoo has a list of web-based desktop sites. There are some like GraphOn.com and WorkSpot.com that allow you to run remote desktops of actual operating systems through the web. WorkSpot seems sluggish, but Linux users might find it interesting to be able to access a Linux desktop through a Java Applet. There is a demo page that lets you try it out for 10 minutes.

Have you tried one of the VNC alternatives? Take a look at Tight VNC. There are others... even some implemented in Java. Take a look at Workspot In particular, try out the demo to see what the performance is like on your net connection.

Have you tried one of the VNC alternatives? Take a look at Tight VNC. There are others... even some implemented in Java. Take a look at Workspot In particular, try out the demo to see what the performance is like on your net connection.

Sean

Martin

Another happy Workspot customer here ^_^ (though I found it listed in Yahoo!, so erase that 'well kept secret' thing).

My experience... let's just say that I uploaded one of my websites with only two commands: unzip and chmod. The work that would have got me silly walking for half the morning done in 30 seconds. Gotta love it. The GIMP, the mahjonng solitaire and the CGI bin are my three other reasons to sign in.

--Hikari

I travel a lot, and I use mainly a laptop (company issued) with Windows 98 on it (yeah, yeah, but I have to use it for Arabic support, as well as exchanging documents with colleagues and customers - so it will stay for a while). I also use a Palm Pilot, and have my home computer (dual boot on Linux).

Moving the data back and forth on these three platforms is a royal pain (in all places!)

My dream would be a web service that allows ALL of the following to be done:

• Access and Reply e-mail from whatever host(s) you access our e-mail from
• Sync my Pilot remotely, so as to have all my e-mails, addresses, appointments both on the Pilot and on that virtual desk top
• Upload and sync all my bookmarks

• Visto Briefcase has most of this, but the sync doesn't work well.
  Netscape Netcenter also has some of this functionality, but the bookmarks do not upload all of them. The same happens to synching my address book. Not all addresses are uploaded (truncation). It has Portfolio, Weather, News which are all nice, but still not the one true desktop
  Other sites I am looking at are
  WorkSpot.Net are a Linux deskop over the net, and was featured in a Slashdot article a few hours ago.
  

  So, I am yet to find an ideal web site that I can use as a one stop shopping for all this.

  Security you say? Who cares? I just have to be aware that there is a potential security issue, and not to put sensitive data there? Same goes for ICQ, ...etc. Regards.
  

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