Office Tools On The Web

ReadWriteWeb writes "What will be the primary elements of an Office Suite for the Web be? Who among the big or small companies is currently providing the best examples? ZDNet's Richard MacManus reviews the contenders for collaborative Web Office tools. Some of these products may well be acquisition targets this year for Microsoft and Google, as it is anticipated that both companies will release fully functional Web Office Suites sometime in the next few years."

Comments

Oh Please!

[mpapet]

Let's check the facts:

Microsoft has a VERY large and very well-developed office suite that connects quite elegantly to a bunch of Microsoft's back office software.

So these start-ups are going to usurp that somehow?

Also, some people love to lease cars, but when it comes to software, I don't see it happening so much.

What they may do is fill some very small gap.

Re:Am I behind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that you have heard of it, go show somebody else. It's the only way for tools without a huge marketing budget to get well-known. Don't all these new technologies trickle down to the majority of people through technophiles like the /. community anyway?

why?

[jcgf]

What would the advantage of a web based office suite as opposed to a regular one? Not having to install software locally comes to mind, but having to upload documents all the time to view them sounds painstaking. Besides, it will probably involve activex controls which need to be installed negating said advantage.

IBM

[Kadin2048]

Didn't we hear just a while ago, in relation to all of the OpenOffice controversy, that IBM was developing some sort of thin-client office productivity suite? I distinctly remember hearing something about it. Actually I remember thinking that it sounded much more Google's style than IBM ... but it was cool nonetheless.

I'm not really sure who they were/are planning on marketing it to -- developing countries, perhaps? -- and I'm not sure that the recent past has really shown much support for the whole "the network is the computer" concept, but maybe they could sell it to people as a cost savings. Get one reasonably priced server, and a dozen or so diskless thin clients, and you could outfit a whole classroom with computers without buying a single copy of Windows or Microsoft Office. And nobody ever has to worry about moving their work from one computer to another, it's always stored and available.

There are a lot of good things that could be said for such a system. It would take me a while to get over my hesitation to use a web browser for anything BUT web browsing, though.

Here is the article I think I heard about it from:
http://news.com.com/2100-1012_3-5208998.html

Business won't bite

[webmistressrachel]

I doubt IT departments will encourage wholesale adoption of this over local storage solutions.

Imagine the news - "Office Farm Servers Hacked Last Night".

Local security just feels safer, even when it's not.

hang on a second...

[Anonymous Coward]

There seems to be a prevailing sense that web applications are all hype and fad. Sure, I don't very much like the idea of hosting my spreadsheets on a server that running who knows where, but within' a business-intranet these ideas start to make alot of sense.

I've worked in accounting with medium sized construction companies for a few years now. I've never "officially" had a position in IT, but at the firms I've worked for I've always been the computer guy.

Within an environment with 'less than savy' computer users and a 'less than low budget' IT department, it would seem that the simplist solution is also the best. My favorite example of this now is using webmail. At the firm I was previously with email is provided through a web hosting company, and yet most of the employees insisted on using Outlook. Now I could see if they made use of more of Outlook's features, but it was just the email and address book that it was being used for. It was just more fat, and if the office had been more willing to switch, I'm sure it would have been a matter of a few weeks before everybody was fully confortable. And that's one less application residing on your local machine that has to be managed (multiply that by 6 machines).

Another example is the office i'm in now. There are 10 machines in my care, all of which run different flavors of windows, office, etc... Some are (yuck!) win98, some win2000, some xp. We've got office 2000 and office xp. It's just a mess. Most of the work we do here is with office or excel, and we're not building nuclear cruise missles, just simple day-to-day paperwork. Would it not make sense to use a web based application, deployed on our intranet server (just used for files and peachtree accounting software), in place of office? Just think of the advantages of having all your users using up to date software with only one install to manage, no more "is that spreadsheet on the server or on my machine".

When I watch my mom log onto hotmail without any hesitation or confusion, I can't help but think that there's something to all the web app buzz. Sometimes I think us /.er's forget about those who don't eat microchips for breakfast.

Re:Why?

[Otter]

What is the point?

As far as I can tell, the only reason everyone here is so excited about it is that they're convinced that Google, with its Super Google Power, will be first to market.

If Microsoft (which, believe it or not, still has a few developers left, plus an existing code base to work from) steps up with first with a closed-source, subscription-based office suite with remotely stored files -- we'll see how enthusiastic the AJAX groupies are then.