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."

Comments

I'm a lazy idiot

[JeanBaptiste]

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

Unwise to use them for confidential data

[davidwr]

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.

Re:Meh...a solution in search of a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you have an office suite. It does everything that 80% of users want. In order to gain more users, the software will need to add features that the remaining 20% needs (or think that they need). At this point most of Microsoft Office's users are content with the feature set. There's no need for them to update. So to gain more users MS will do a couple things: Forced incompatibility with previous versions; add new features.

The problem for them is that most users, including myself and my family, don't need any of the new features.

At the same time, all the other office suites are gaining features. At some point they reach a "good enough" stage where they don't need MS Office. These suites are all significantly cheaper than MS Office. For example, many are $79 or $99 versus $200 or more for MSOffice.

So the added value is the price... Sometimes they're "free" with PC purchase or can be purchased for a fraction of MSOffice or are indeed *free*.

Are people crazy?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[deathy_epl ccs]

Arrow keys? You, sir, are obviously not a serious vi user. heheheheh

Only really good for small-scale use

[compupc1]

I believe these types of thin-client office suites will never move beyond a novelty, at least with the current architecture of the web. Some random reasons why:

• Privacy. Do you really want all your personal, private documents being stored on some remote server?
• Reliability. Not only do you depend on your computer being up, but you also depend on the remote server being up and your network connection being up.
• Mobility. While on one hand, a web-based application does offer greater mobility, it also requires an Internet connection. I can't count the number of times I've worked in a car or at some other location without connectivity.
• Responsiveness. There will always be a latency involved that far exceeds that found on fat clients.
• Capability. I'm sorry, but the whole web 2.0 phenomenon has pushed HTML, CSS, and JavaScript far beyond what they were intended for. As long as we're relying on these technologies, documents created with web applications will never be as capable of the expressiveness of a documents created with a fat client. Using applets or ActiveX or something like Flash would probably mitigate this.
• Development. Thin clients are arguably easier to develop than fat clients. However, as soon as you introduce things like AJAX and complex scripting into the picture, things balloon out of control at an alarming rate. You spend most of your time fighting the basic request/response nature of the web. AJAX is really just one big hack to overcome this. AJAX is nice for adding bits of dynamic functionality to web sites, but it shouldn't be used for stuff like this. In fairness, I should note that better tool support and frameworks like the GWT and RAP will go a long way twoards addressing this.

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.