23 Musings

So after all the rumours of the weekend, which if you've been following them have pointed to a big announcement from Microsoft regarding online office productivity and possibly moving their entire office suite into the cloud, an announcement came from Redmond yesterday.

However, it wasn't what was expected, in fact it was much weaker and no threat to any existing players.

They've announced the launch of a beta of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online is a definite move towards software plus services.

It's interesting none the less as this comes right after Google Sites who are a contender for those looking for a simple online collaboration tool to build intranet/extranets with. SharePoint is much more full featured and as such much more suited to large enterprises.

We'll have to wait and see whether anything else comes out this week...

Nicholas Carr (former exec editor of the Harvard Business Review) has just posted a rumour on his blog that Microsoft may be planning to announce a move to push it's applications into the cloud. It's something that's been expected but there hasn't been any rumours that it's impending for ages. Moving to web access for apps is a natural thing for Microsoft to do soon and could be huge!

Nicholas is highly respected (I've been a fan of his FT and Guardian articles for ages) and even if the rumour isn't true it most likely does mean some kind of announcement is coming soon.

It's been a while since Zoho announced their offline capabilities using Google Gears (back in August in fact). At the time I blogged about their announcement of offline read capability with the write functionality coming in a matter of weeks.

Well, they've now announced full offline functionality. Still using Google Gears the feature will allow you to finish off that document while disconnected from the web and then synchronise changes when you connect again.

The functionality is only available for Zoho Writer at the moment, but I'd hope to see it rolled out across their suite of products soon.

Interestingly, Zoho have also spotted the announcements about Live Documents. They've responded with a post on their blog about the revenue claims made by Sabeer Bhatia.

It's going to be interesting in the online office market. I still think Google may have something up their sleeves which could make them dominant, but who do you think will be the winners?

A new entrant has launched in the online office product arena. This latest release into the office 2.0 world comes from someone with a heritage in making very succesful web apps. The chairman is none other than Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of the hugely popular Hotmail. Sabeer sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1997 for $400M, so he definitely knows what he's doing.

Anyway, I became aware of this thanks to an article in the Times.

Interesting that they have taken the shrewd step of using the interface of Microsoft Office for their product. One of the key issues with other online office products such as Google Apps is the difficulty ordinary users have in getting used to a new interface. Live Documents promises to look and feel just like MS Office and even better it has a software plug-in so that you can continue to use your desktop software and still get the best of the online service.

With everything that is being said about Live Documents in the blogosphere it seems this could be really big with the right PR.

I'm so pleased that someone has come along and shown the right approach to online productivity. Getting both online and offline functionality with real time synchronisation and integration with desktop software in a free service has got to be a big draw. The 100mb storage limit is a little low but I'd expect that to rise if they want to compete with the established players such as Google.

Webpro News has a sneak peek at Microsoft Office Live Workspace available on their site. The screenshots look great to me and it has a typically Microsoft Office interface which will surely work in their favour.

It will let you store documents online, view them, share them and make use of collaboration tools. However, at this stage I see no evidence of being able to edit them in the browser and it appears to purely be an online complement to the desktop applications.

Surely being able to edit and create documents without the need for access to MS Office on a PC has to come next, along with tools to synchronise the documents both ways. Otherwise this is purely a glorified storage area and won't compete with other online office 2.0 offerings.

Or at least it will be soon...

For ages I've been waiting for some offline functionality to arrive for Google Docs to allow me to work offline on spreadsheets and documents and then work online on them later, keeping them synchronised. I've been expecting this to arrive from Google in the form of a Gears application but it seems like everyone is dying to beat them to the launch.

Docsyncer is in private beta at the moment and promises full on/offline synchronisation between your Microsoft Office documents and Google Docs. Docsyncer will run quietly in the background on your PC and upload (and download) any changes made to documents in either environment (desktop or online).

This is fantastic news! I can't wait to try it, being an avid user of Google Docs this will aid my productivity hugely! How long Docsyncer will remain an independent company and not just another part of Google is anyones guess...

Wow! Sometimes a new product launches that really captures the imagination. Today I've come across a software product that I could really use! It would instantly fill a requirement I have that would make my life easier and more productive, and thats something it's very rare to say about software these days!

Splashtop is an instant access desktop environment for web browsing. Now my laptop is bloated (time to get a new one) and can take an age to boot especially when connected to the network. What I really need is a way to access key applications quickly without having to wait for the horrendous Windows boot experience to finish. Splashtop cures that straight away!

The promise is (as I haven't got a copy to try so I'm going on trust) that within seconds of switching on a PC you're presented with a screen that allows you to access web browsing and Skype straight away. You don't even need to load the OS at all!

It sounds amazing! Currently only supporting their own web browser and Skype but sure to add more in time it could become my weapon of choice for quick access to my digital life. See the video below for a demo:

Now that looks great doesn't it?

But imagine this for a moment... Splashtop do a deal with a decent browser (eg. Mozilla), not saying that theirs is no good but I haven't tried it yet, and suddenly you have access to all your online apps. I use Gmail for email, Google Docs and Apps for office tools, Basecamp for project management and many other online apps. So I don't really need Windows or MS Office anymore. So I don't really need my OS (yes I know, I should be on Linux but I'm lazy...). With a product like Splashtop I can access all of this instantly with no boot up time. Great for when you really need to grab something quick or check emails on the go. The only thing I need to know is quite how you'd connect to the web if the OS hasn't booted???

So, in conclusion... This could be really big and it could also get snapped up quick by someone such as Google as it would make a great addition to the stable and be one in the eye for Microsoft all at once!

So, Adobe have announced the acquisition of an interesting company. Virtual Ubiquity have a very cool online wordprocessing tool called Buzzword. This brings Adobe into a new arena of competition where it hasn't really focused up to now. They will now be going head to head with Google, Zoho, Thinkfree and Microsoft.

What's most intriguing about this deal is just how good a Flash based wordprocessor could actually be. Flash, if well constructed, can be incredibly easy to use, something that any online office tool must have as its key selling point.

Throw in Adobes new service Share, which allows users to share and publish online documents, and the portability and ease of use of PDF files and Adobe could have quite an engaging offering quite quickly. Share also includes REST API's to allow document data to be integrated into other apps.

The plan is for it to be ported over to AIR 1.0 when that is released early next year, giving Buzzword offline capabilities as well. Could they beat Google to this holy grail of the online office app?

Things are getting interesting, time for Microsoft to make their move perhaps? Silverlight?

I blogged back in June about Google's ambitions to add a presentation app to Docs & Spreadsheets. They purchased Zenter who made an online Powerpoint clone and discussed the future of Docs & Spreadsheets at conferences. Now they've announced the launch of the third office app in their stable.

It's quite a basic presentation tool at present, I'm sure with much richer functionality to come in the future. The great thing is that as with all their apps you can collaborate on the creation of new slide shows and when it's time to present users can connect through Google Talk to watch and chat about the presentation.

Powerful stuff! Still waiting on the true offline capabilities though...

So Yahoo have one of the biggest email services out there on the web and yet they've shown no desire to get into the online office productivity realm, that is until now.

Yahoo have announced that they've brought Zimbra into the Yahoo fold to allow them to make Yahoo Mail on steroids! They've paid $350m for the pleasure of being able to join the race to create the first really viable alternative to Microsoft Office. Obviously Google is a long way ahead but if Yahoo is going to flash the cash they could catch up very quickly.

The way Zimbra offer email, calendering, contacts, document authoring all in a collaborative browser based on and offline experience is going to be an amazing add on to Yahoo Mail. I'd imagine we'd see a corporate/paid for version of this suite too.

So what's next for Yahoo I wonder? Possible Zoho acquisition?

Zoho, those creators of funky web based office apps, will be announcing offline functionality for Zoho Writer their word processor tool today. This may be the first on/offline office app of it's type.

The functionality has been built with Google Gears. That's a huge smack in the face for Google as they should have been first with this kind of offline functionality for their own Google Docs, not letting a competitor use their own technology to beat them to it. Users will need to install a plugin to allow the offline functionality, but that's it, really simple.

Read-only functionality is coming first for the offline users. Read/write will be added in a number of weeks and thats the killer app.

Zoho are constantly one step ahead of Google and other online office tool providers. Google et al need to step up a gear and launch some serious innovation if they are to catch up (functionality wise that is).

Here's a video presentation about the functionality:

Edit: Zoho have now released the functionality and posted on their blog about the features.

I blogged the other day about Adobe looking into using it's AIR platform to create an on/offline office suite of tools. Adobe have now come out to deny this.

Last week Mike Downey, Adobe's group manager for platform evangelism, hinted the company might be about to develop such software.

Downey clarified the situation in an interview. He said Adobe would focus primarily on providing its development platform, AIR, rather than creating online Office-style applications.

Downey said: "Our primary focus is building a platform that allows developers to build great web-based applications. AIR is the ideal platform for building these types of web applications that are robust and powerful."

Shame I think, Adobe have always made great apps and AIR is the perfect platform to create a real on/offline experience for the office tools user. I think they should go for it, innovation and experimentation never hurts (just look at Google).

Google are doing really well with their push to get universities to sign up to their free Google Apps Education Edition.

The latest news is that the universities of North Carolina Greensboro, Clemson, Texas San Antonio, Kennesaw State and Arkansas State have signed up for the free service, which comprises of email, messaging, online calendars, word processing, and spreadsheets.

They join other universities like the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Trinity College in Dublin and Nihon University in Tokyo, who already use Google's applications.

This really is one in the eye for Microsoft. Supplying universities with software has been a lucrative flow of money for Microsoft for years, if Google keep eating away at this Microsoft will notice the drop in profits!

Interesting news out today that Adobe may be considering jumping into the office productivity market in the future. Now that they have the Adobe AIR runtime platform they have a perfect framework for creating desktop apps that have online connectivity. That would seem a natural framework for creating an on/offline synchronising suite of office tools.

Adobe AIR is a fascinating product as it gives you all the power and potential of the internet right on your desktop. Maybe Google will buy Adobe and port it's Apps, Docs and Gmail onto the AIR platform (as I blogged about yesterday)?

There seems to be a monthly announcement on the Google Blog about the acquisition of another office 2.0 start-up. This time around Google have announced the purchase of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.

So further to my news about the Powerpoint viewer in Gmail and the reports of Google presentation ambitions, it seems Google are all set to build a web based presentation tool which will be firmly integrated into their online office system Google Apps.

It's a winner for the Y Combinator fund as well because they funded Zenter in the early days, more on this aspect at Techcrunch.

I blogged the other day about the new feature in Gmail to view a Powerpoint presentation within your browser and surmised at the end that it may be the first step to releasing it as an app. It seems I was right. An interview with Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google's enterprise division in PCWorld says exactly that!

He says "Presentation is a feature of Google Documents, it's not as much building a separate presentation application. We are building this ability to present from a document."

Sounds good to me! Google Apps is brilliant and I use it just as much as Microsoft Office now especially for the collaborative nature and portability.

Other forthcoming additions to Google Apps discussed are video, note-taking, blogging and group-discussion applications. The article also says that Google are aiming to establish parity between the offline and online capabilities of its productivity suite. This will be the killer piece of the online office suite and will utilise the Google Gears API's.

Once offline ability is added I may well throw away Microsoft Office for good!