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Investigating Online Office Suites
jcatcw writes "Computerworld reviewed four online office suites — Ajax13, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, ThinkFree Online and Zoho Office Suite. None has all the applications and features of Microsoft Office, but if you're looking for the core office applications in an access-anywhere format, at least two were surprisingly sophisticated. The article weighs the ability to save files to a centralized server quite heavily in its ranking. The winner is ThinkFree Office because it provides the most sophisticated features and has the best Microsoft Office compatibility. Zoho's suite is the second choice."
I still prefer emacs *Awaits bashing from VI users*
I've been satisfied with Google D&S, mostly because it's now well integrated (bundled?) with my Gmail account. Then I tried to print a hard copy of a Google Doc for the first time yesterday. Now I'm less impressed. (Google's definition of a 'pt' and Word's are way off.)
Still, the sharing feature is cool. But the Gmail integration is the main reason I'm loathe to try any alternatives.
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
but enough about me. I really like Open Office. Do these 'compete' with OOo? Or do these solve some sort of other problem? Would I use OOo _and_ one of these things? Why?
thanks in advance
Read the first page and then any pages on that site after that had an error message.
I would have grabbed the article text. Maybe someone else can post it if they get through for others that get bugged.
How can any of them score better in the MS Office Compatability category? Don't they all use the same Open Office conversion code underneath to read .doc files? I'd be really surprised if anyone had gone through the trouble to reproduce that work themselves.
I've kicked the tires on the web 2.0 office stuff that you get with Gmail but I guess I still don't see much of a point to these.
Virtually every computer I use in business and at home already has an office suite built in, whether it be Office, OpenOffice, or whatever-Dell-is-shipping-these-days.
At home, my office use consists of writing sick day excuse notes for my kids.
At the office, all my customers and colleagues use and have Office and most of the documents eventually end up in PDF form anyway. Versioning and sharing can be done using wikis or other web spaces.
So why use this? What's the added value over the tools that are out there now?
It's very unwise to use a hosted-server solution to store confidential or private data unless it's encrypted and you hold the only keys or you've got a contractual agreement that the hosts will never look at the data absent a court order and that they are liable if an adversary breaks in for any reason other than your negligence.
Keep this in mind when you use services to create or save documents. It doesn't matter if it's a spreadsheet, email, or what-not.
And for heaven's sake don't store my credit-card number on Google. CowboyNeal's maybe but not mine.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I can see where these services would be useful for collaborative projects involving people in far flung locations. But for regular business use how many companies want to store their data on someone else's server?
"500 Servlet Exception
java.lang.NullPointerException "
with the stack trace.
How are you folks reading it? Oh wait, I forgot. This is /.!
Virtudyne/Simdesk???? http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Best_of_2006_0x3a_ _The_Virtudyne_Saga.aspx
I blame geof's speakers.
Unsurprisingly, ThinkFree was chosen as their preferred "online" Office Suite. FWIW, ThinkFree is an amazing piece of software that blasted onto the scene back in '99 - '00. The most amazing part of it was how it so closely resembled Microsoft Office. Given it's age, it's no surprise that it "won" this comparison.
:)
Of course, there is a caveat. Thinkfree uses client-side Java rather than being pure-Ajax. This gives it a distinct advantage as the Java GUI tools are far more mature than the embryonic Ajax GUIs. Basically, it was a bit of an unfair fight. Which would bother me, except that Thinkfree Office is an excellent product, and deserves the exposure.
So if you find yourself with a need for a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software on the go, keep Thinkfree in mind. It may cost money, but it's quite a bit more convenient than a Linux LiveCD.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I find Google Docs pretty useful for doing my college assignments. As a group, I don't have to mail every revision to all my team mates and just collaborate online - a wiki of sorts. Wish they'd have a better way of putting in images though ...
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.
One interesting thing I read about their choice (ThinkFree) is that they offer software you can install on your own server to store your documents safely and securely. If you're a company, you could run your own ThinkFree server, presumably with as much security and encryption you want. Or heck, since it only costs $30 per year, I suppose you could run your own ThinkFree server with any security and encryption you want, access your documents anywhere, and still come out way ahead financially if you're willing to give up some of the high-end features of native suites.
Show me one that can perform a least squares analysis or factor analysis of a large data set.
Who in their right mind is going to store their documents on a system controlled by some dotcom company. There are a number of downsides to this and not a whole lot of upsides.
You would at least want some sort of contract to say that can't do things with your documents. That still won't protect you against searches by LE. At least when the data is on your servers, you should get a heads up (barring black bag jobs) that LE has taken an interest in you.
If the company goes bankrupt you may lose your data.
Why not just have the data on a server you can access remotely and have the proper tools with you to edit that data (e.g. a laptop or livecd). You can keep the data encrypted on the server if you don't trust the host.
I disagree. If an office doesn't have the expertise or money to be able to properly secure their network, then letting professionals handle that is a better option. I was managing my own business' web server, mail server, etc. One day, I realized that I really didn't know enough, and I didn't have the time to learn about it. I outsourced it, and now security is their problem, not mine. Considering that my various hosting thingies are being run by professional admins makes me feel much better than doing my own hosting, and being administered by a weekend hobbyist administrator (me).
I just tried it. The client-side Java wanted to mess with all the security stuff in place in the corporate environment. It just wasn't going to fly. Maybe it will load at home. Anyway, gonna stick with Google docs & spreadsheets. As someone above said, a big feature is its integration with gmail.
Lets see... Desktop PCs, servers, Office Suite, Accounts package, RDBMS, web servers, application server, security software, Windows administrator, server administrator, database administrator... It all adds up.
Now imagine Google does it all for you, all you need is a client application and a network connection. They guarantee performance, security and that your data is yours when you want it. All for $20 per month per seat.
Deleted
disclaimer - this is entirely speculation
You are very correct, however here is the beauty of this whole scenario, after the kinks are ironed out with all of this, then I anticipate that they will release an appliance with the Web/App and storage included (or SAN attachable), allowing for corporations to have their own Office Solution. The real bonus from this comes from the ability to archive and search all from the web/app. Imagine being to be able to search all of the companies documents (assuming your position allows) to find that essential piece of data. This gives you all of the bonuses with minimal pitfalls.
Except of course the single point of failure.
Remember Google and these other companies have to be able to make money some way. Ad supported is fine, but eventually they need to be able to expand.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
The ability to integrate Gmail and D&S could be a big advantage, but frankly I've been a bit disappointed that they haven't leveraged it more obviously.
Case in point: a few days ago someone emailed me a DOC file. Why isn't there an option to open it in D&S? It'll view it as HTML, or Download it, but what I'd really like would be one-click to turn it into an editable, publishable document. As it was, I had to download it, then re-upload it to D&S in order to produce an editable version. Not a huge problem, but if I had been on a computer where I wasn't allowed to save documents, it would have been. It's just stupid to make me pull a document down to my local machine from one Google server, only to upload it back to another Google server a minute later.
Also, when you do have a document open in D&S, why isn't there an option to email a copy to someone? Okay, I know I can invite them to edit it online, and I could always publish it and send them an invite, but why not something where I can send them a DOC version as an email attachment? That's a lot easier for many people to deal with. And while we're at it, how about some form of change tracking that would let me email a copy to someone, let them edit it offline, and then a way to re-import it to D&S (via the one-click, above) so that it would be change-tracked, as if they had logged-in to edit it? Expecting everyone to have a Google ID to edit documents is ridiculous. I can't convince everyone in my family to get Google IDs, much less everyone I'd like to share documents with, everywhere.
I think it's a great service, and a great start. But it has a long way to go, even within becoming part of Google's "suite" of services.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder if these could be easily turned into standalone/local versions by bundling a customized web server and browser into an "application".
Or maybe that would be a waste of time.
The problem these solve is twofold.
Problem One is how do you get to all your data, when you might use five or six computers during the course of a week? Rather than having to carry around a laptop/keychain-drive/floppy, D&S lets you sit down at any internet-enabled computer and access all your stuff. You don't need to worry about having the applications installed, or the right copy of that document; it's all on the server, along with the applications.
Problem Two is collaboration. There are some existing solutions for working on documents collaboratively, but generally they're either complicated to set up, inelegant (no WYSIWIG editing, e.g., most Wikis), expensive (MS SharePoint), or all of the above. Google provides a way for geographically separated people to work on the same document, without having to roll out any infrastructure.
As a trivial example, I used a Google document a few months ago to put together my family's gift list for the holidays. (Leaving the obvious neuroses of my family out of this, suffice it to say that we're big on lists.) I created a list, and then sent invitations to various people, who added items to their section of the list. At the end, anyone could look and see what everyone else wanted. Doing that over email would have been a huge mess; I would have had to send out multiple copies and carefully re-merge them with a master, in order to maintain the versioning and make sure information didn't get lost.
Although I wouldn't be comfortable putting corporate proprietary information on a service like Google's, but for Christmas and grocery lists, it's pretty neat. It's far from perfect (see my previous comment in this thread), but it's one of the best no-setup, free-as-in-beer collaborative systems I've found.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I've only used Google Docs (which I still prefer to call Writely because it has fewer syllables) though I'm sure the others are similar.
The one feature that I find novel is the way it does revisions, especially for multi-author documents. The Writely revisions interface is looking more and more like MS Word's "track changes" but with the additional benefits that (a) many people can edit at the same time, and (b) you can see all revisions ever made, whereas in Word, once an author overwrites his own revisions you can't see the old version anymore.
What's worked pretty well with a lot of my colleagues these days is to do everything on Writely until the text is complete, then one person downloads it and does the formatting in Word. (Then submit the paper and get rejected, but that happens with or without Writely.)
That said, I still think LaTeX looks the best but I don't know as many people who use it.
Comparing compatibility to MS Office is the same as articles claiming something was "as large as a VW car," "as heavy as two schoolbuses," or "as long as two and a half football fields." It's not a freaking standard, and we shouldn't have to abide by it.
Unfortunately, though, we do. :/
As lovely as these are, there's no way any real business is going to entrust their data into any of these. I can't imagine a merger deal on wall street being worked out using these tools.
The thin client over the net is really a poor way to organize an office suite. The only reason to use it is to save $$.
Loosing the ability to use it if your net connection fails is a show stopper right there.
"Fix it"
I've used three of the four office suites they tested(Never heard of zoho). Their assessment is spot on. ThinkFree is very comparable to the real thick client office suites and doesn't feel at all like a clunky web app. The second place finisher behind it is a very distant second. It was intersting that they said google was thinking of buying them. I'm not sure if I'm happy about that given what they have been able to accomplish on their own, but it would be nice if it was integrated with Google's other tools. All that being said, I almost always use Open Office or Microsoft Office in my daily life(Open Office at home). I'm just not convinced I need an online option on any more than rare occasions and don't really want to be dependent on an internet connection. However, if you haven't tried ThinkFree out, you should. I wish there were more web based apps with that kind of quality. If there were, I'd be more likely to take the web 2.0 nonsense seriously.
At any given time, I could be at home, at one of three offices, or at a random public terminal. (My laptop's broken screen means it's stuck at home :( )
If I need to update one of my tracking spreadsheets, I don't need to worry about whether the computer has a USB outlet (and remember to take it out!), which SD card my file is on, which version of the file is most recent, or whether that computer has the right software to read my file. (Not to mention that office suites tend to take a while to load up)
Every computer that I use has an internet connection and firefox, and I can quickly and reliably log on to Google Spreadsheets to update my spreadsheets.
Now that Google spreadsheets also has a "history" function, I also don't have to worry about constantly saving local backups, either (although my spreadsheets tend to be too big for it to be of much use).
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Unpleasantly enough, this is a poorly formatted article where despite their big bold title, you don't find out until page 4 who they think the winner is (ThinkFree). No summary/comparison table either. Bleh.
Say it with me class, "you pick the right technology for the job". Thin clients have their place. Office suites is not one of them.
-James
Check out this page on integrating Google Docs and LaTeX:
http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/research/googledocs.php
If you open a gmail message with an attached wordprocessor or spreadsheet document it has a link by the attachment icon allowing it to be opened, edited or saved in Google Docs & Spreadsheets
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
well, the functionality is quite limited however. What is does is it converts the doc files into html and then publishes it online.....it doesn't allow other people to edit it...not soooo bad but of course people use to have much more expectations from google than what it is providing now as far as integration of gmail and D&S is concerned :-)
well, the conclusion seems to that use the local machine for editing etc. and then use google or whatever for only publishing purposes.
is that you give your data over to a company you may or may not trust. Php packages like Wordpress, Metawiki, and Drupal have shown that hosting your own service with standard, open-source software can be a great thing. Why are there no popular open source office suites that you can host on your own server? The time is right.
Tried Google docs pretty extensively (back when it was Writely) It's functionality covers about 99% of what I need in a word processor. But it's slower than somethign running locally.
However the big killer is that my documents go away when either the server goes down or the internet is unavailable.
I can carry my laptop everywhere. I can't get reliable internet connections everywhere. Even reliable electricity is hard some places.
It' a nice idea, and I'll try it again in a couple years. But I'd rather see a service that I can deploy on my own server so my documents are really the property of my organization.
Are you sure you are getting that on *word processing* documents? I think that I may have seen that when I've been sent a spreadsheet...but it's definitely not there on some DOC files that I've got in my Inbox.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You'd only be able to use it on machines that had emacs installed, but it would not be a huge deal to write elisp that would allow people to load and store files from/to a single centralized server (with seperate user accounts, and the ability to list what files a particular account had, once you were authenticated).
Tell you what. I'm a consultant with many Healthcare industry clients. You give me a way to set up an online office server at the client's site to make the entire thing an internal app and I'll consider approaching them about it. Til then, every one of these apps is a HIPPA violation (i.e., a guarantee that the government will shut you down if you are in healthcare). Sorry, but I'm not going to send private medical history info to some random service just because they have a posted "privacy policy".
That said, the idea is solid and there are industries for which maybe this is a good idea.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom