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the official Google blog just has announced the aquisition of JotSpot, a well-known player in the market of collaborative wiki- & online-office products reviewed some time ago. as for the deal, I’m not sure what to make of it: while few key-modules of JotSpot (spreadsheets, word processing) are already part of Google’s web-office offering (in my opinion outperforming JotSpot’s counterparts), JotSpot could bring in new features like business-oriented wikis, project management, call-tracking, knowledgebase- and recruiting-management etc. regarding how long it took Google to snort up integrate Writely, I wonder if they wouldn’t be better off adding their own wiki-functioniality to Google Office, which is just taking shape.

for the moment, JotSpot’s registration is closed until accounts are integrated with Google, charged JotSpot-customers will be converted to free-accounts (while remaining functionality, of course).

update: following coverage at GigaOm and TechCrunch.

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.