office is dead #7 – JotSpot

Posted on | September 11, 2006 | No Comments

while Google developers are still busy knitting together their various web-assets to form a defacto online-office suite, JotSpot might be a few steps ahead, offering a comprehensive collaboration suite for small/medium teams. JotSpot is based on a wiki-engine, spiced up with lots of additional mini-apps:

• Calendar – a very simple tool to share dates among team-members. while it’s possible to create seperate calendar-pages for your users, there is no way to coordinate events among team-members. recurring events are not supported – don’t expect anything like Google Calendar
• Spreadsheets – again, compared to Google Spreadsheets, JotSpot’s sheets are stripped down to the minimum. there are only about 10 simple formulas, which have to be entered manually
• File Cabinets & Photo Pages – very, you guessed it, basic tools for sharing documents and images
• Project Manager – tasklists and due-dates, including email-notification and project-overview

further extensions include a bug tracking system, an FAQ-style Knowledge Base, addressbook, Recruiting Manager (integrates Google-searchresults on job-candidates! ), a Call Log for tracking phonecalls, discussion-forums and a polling-tool. while the wiki-functionalities are quite solid, most additional apps are way too restricted for my taste. still, integrating such a diversity of apps has some appeal, so if JotSpot manages to catch up with competition it could become an interesting alternative.

JotSpot’s free version is basically a trial to make you hot, considering its limitation to a mere of 10 wiki-pages and max. 5 users. charged hosting ranges from about monthly $10 (10 users, 100 pages) to $200 (unlimited users, 5.000 pages). while JotSpot generally is hosting your workspace on their datacenter (yourworkspace.jotspot.com), it’s also possible to install it on your own servers, starting at $25 for 25 users.

(read my other articles on office-is-dead)

update: Om Malik asked “Are Desktop Apps Dead?” on GigaOM today (has some interesting reader-comments!), plus he did a podcast with Niall Kennedy on the very same topic.

 

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