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OpenOffice Online Goes Beta
Stony Stevenson sends word of the beta availability of a software-as-a-service version of OpenOffice 2.3, brought to us by Mandriva Linux creator Gael Duval. According to Ars, this package "easily offers the most features of any online office suite," though it "lacks the collaborative or document-sharing features of competitors like Google Docs or even Microsoft's Office Live Workspace." "To create this feature-rich environment, Online OpenOffice.org requires a modern browser with JavaScript and the Sun Java Runtime Environment version 1.4+ plug-in. The setup has been tested in Firefox 1.5 and above, IE6 and 7, and even Safari, though Ubuntu users are specifically warned that they must be using the Sun Java (Sun JRE) plug-in or the current implementation of Online OpenOffice.org won't work."
Looks like the program is projected over a VNC, Remote X, Citrix, or some other remote GUI session. The good news is that such a design makes the software as interactive as a desktop application. The bad news is that it's a sign of minimal changes, which can sometimes mean a poor-quality product. (e.g. The complaints about lack of document sharing.)
I'm a big fan of delivering software over the web, but simply remote GUI sessions aren't going to do it. Consumers may not know *why* the software acts the way it does, but they will see through the ruse to something they can get for much less than the asking price. Heck, setup a Unix server or Windows Terminal Server and you can push out the app just as effectively.
I'll give them an B+ for effort, but a D- for execution. Let's hope they customize the app a bit more in the future, and close the gaps to become a competitive product.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The one major advantage that I find to online systems even without document sharing is that it makes it incredibly easy to access my documents from multiple computers. As a college student, I often find myself working on a document (whether a paper, a to-do list, etc.) that I need to access from my computer, from my lab computers, and from kiosks in the library.
While I can put my file on my flash drive, some web kiosks on campus don't have Office or OpenOffice installed and thus won't open my documents. As such, I find it much easier to put simple documents that I need to open from many locations into my google docs account, and then I don't have to worry about the portability thing. For people like me, online systems really can be useful even if they don't include document-sharing capabilities.
Slightly off topic, but I always thought LyX would be a prime candidate for an online document processor. It already has a thin frontend and separate backend. Making the frontend an online application would free users from having to install TeX with all its packages and fonts, and all sorts of other LyX files. It would also let you manage all your templates centrally, for example an organization could have all their templates on a LyX server, and employees would just need to run a possibly browser based thin client.
AccountKiller