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this is probably not news, but I just recognized that Gmail/Calendar seems to handle event-invitations via email (like typically sent by Microsoft Outlook/Exchange-users) quite well. not only does Gmail offer to create an event-entry in Google Calendar (I was aware of that), but it also allows to give direct response (”Are you coming? Yes/NoMaybe…”) to the sender. the same seems to work with outgoing email (”Add event info”). seems like the last missing peaces of the “how-to create an outlook-killer”-puzzle are getting in place!

watching their promotional video, Scrybe is going to be the next generation of online calendar-applications. more so, the dynamically zooming calendar views look slicker than any desktop schedule seen so far. besides common calendar functionality, Scrybe manages integrated tasklists and stores thoughts and web-snippets of all kind. the not-to-be-missed video demos the gorgeous user-interface, extended suppot for different timezones, impressive copy&paste import from office-applications (Microsoft Excel in particular) and - a bit oldschool but nonetheless handy - printing-capabilities.

while this all sounds (& looks) great, the best is yet to come: Scrybe promises seamless offline access, therefor overcoming current online office-apps’ major drawback. it’s not really clear how this offline mode & synchronisation will be implemented, but possible solutions would be a local desktop-application, a local proxy-server or some kind of flash storage (the latter being the most advanced & platform-independent approach - also, a commenter at Ajaxian pointed out the Scrybe is most likely a Flash/Flex-application).

beta-accounts should be available somewhere until the end of october, and according to the buzz I’m not the only one looking forward to get my hands on Scrybe

Coghead, a web-environment & -framework for rapid develoment of data- and process-driven online-applications, launched into closed beta this week - and received a lot of good press. Coghead is aimed at information workers who have developed desktop/LAN-applications using Microsoft Access or Visual Basic in the past (there’s plenty of them!). while competitor Dabbe DB is solely focused on data-collection and -storage, Coghead seems to go further by offering form editors and even a tool for modelling business processes. sounds very interesting - expect more details as soon as I’m in the beta!

(Coghead Form Editor)

(Coghead Process Modeler)

in the mist of office 2.0, TechCrunch reports on Preezo (blog), an online presentation-builder similar to Thumbstacks. the creation of one-man-army Jason Roberts, Preezo tries to emulate Microsoft Powerpoint’s user interface as closely as possible. can’t say much on the application, since Preezo is in closed beta right now (screenshot courtesy of TechCrunch).

Office 2.0, the conference on web-technology and office software taking place in San Francisco on october 11th & 12th, is accompanied by Office 2.0 Podcast Jam - a meta-blog collecting live-blogging around the event, podcasts published by speakers, scheduled chats with conference hosts and presenters as well as audio-content produced by non-attendees - a great resource and a way to contribute for those not able to attend!

while Google’s vision of online office is slowly taking shape, Zoho - an early innovator in the online office market (read an earlier review here) - announced the (re-)launch of Zoho Virtual Office on the occasion of office 2.0, an office-focused conference starting in San Francisco today. Virtual Office will integrate ten formerly loose components (word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, database, CRM among others) under a single sign-on and add further collaborative tools like webmail, calendar and project management. regarding the comprehensive functioniality of the modules, the integrated package will most probably be a worthy competitior to an eventually emerging Google Office.

ThinkFree, the third major provider of online productivity applications, has announcend an AJAX-Edition of its Java-based product a few weeks ago. still I wouldn’t be to surprised if we hear further news from ThinkFree while office 2.0 goes into its final day tomorrow…

Google finally integrated Writely (acquired in march 2006) and Google Spreadsheets in what would probably become Google Office at some point - Google Docs & Spreadsheets (http://docs.google.com). supplementing those Google Apps released a few weeks ago, the online office suite is now almost complete, the last piece of the puzzle still missing being a presentation-module (and maybe a database/-collection tool similar to Dabble DB). Docs & Spreadsheets manages text-documents and sheets in one central place, giving users access to export-, tagging-, sharing- and collaboration-features.

while collaborative features and user interface are now aligned equal in both Docs and Spreadsheets, some obvious functionality like direct embedding of tables into docs isn’t implemented yet. on a side note: Google Docs can easily publish to common blogging-systems (MoveableType, MetaWeblog, Blogger…). considering spell checking and instant saving of documents, this could make Google Docs an interesting alternative blog-editor (in fact this post was written that way).

ThinkFree previewed an AJAX Edition of their online Office suite on DEMOfall last weekend, promising increased performance compared to the Java-only version (reviewed here), roundtrip compatibility with Microsoft Office (meaning that it’s possible to exchange documents back and forth without losing layout or data) and improved collaboration features. compared to most competitors, ThinkFree currently offers by far the best functionality, so it’ll be interesting to see how well they can migrate features from Java to Javascript. here’s a (low-res) video of ThinkFree’s talk at DEMOfall, the presentation-module looks quite cool.

while ThinkFree didn’t announce a release-date for the AJAX Edition yet, the company rolled out another nice feature with their product recently: ThinkFree Office can now access images from Flickr directly, even allowing users to query pictures free for non-commercial usage.

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.

after almost two years of rumours, Google yesterday officially announced their plans on creating an online-office-suite. in a first step, well-known applications GMail, GTalk, GCalendar and GPage Creator will be offered under the brand ‘Google Apps for Your Domain‘. integration of word-processor Writely and Google Spreadsheet are expected to follow very soon. Google Apps will be ad-supported and therefor free of charge.

Google Apps works very similar to GMail for Domains, a product which has been in silent beta for some time now. oganizations using Google Apps are required to redirect the DNS-pointers of their domain to Google’s mail- and web-servers (the latter is only required for using Page Creator). Google clearly aims their communications-package at small and medium sized companies running on Microsoft Exchange or similar products (read Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab for some prophecies predictions on GApps impact).

for more, checkout InformationWeek’s in-depth feature!