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these days, web-office is inseparably connected with heavy use of AJAX & Javascript. unlike all applications I’ve tried out so far, office-suite ThinkFree is based on good ‘old Java (without -Script). anybody involved in IT-business for more than five years will probably remember, that the idea of Java-based office apps has been around for quite some time - I found traces of Corel’s Java Office dating back to 1997. however, back in the day, complex Java-apps on the web were a pain in the ass in regards to required CPU-power and startup-time.
ThinkFree Office can be used in various ways: the ad-supported online-version is free and includes 1 gbyte of storage. for those rare times off-the-grid, a desktop-version is available for roughly USD 50,-. being able to work on your documents when offline is a great feature which most providers of online-office-apps can’t offer. I’m thinking of the expenses using your cellphone for internet-access abroad or long-distance flights (if you’re allowed to use your laptop at all). to round things up, companies can install ThinkFree on their own servers at a cost of USD 30,- per user. I’m probably starting to sound like dead2.0, but it’s good to see an office-service backed by an actual business-model.

ThinkFree covers basic office-requirements with a word-processor-, spreadsheet- and presentation-module. all three apps are looking extremely similar to Microsoft Office, some toolbars and icons even being almost perfect clones. naturally, Java-applets take quite a time when loaded for the first time, but thanks to smart caching, subsequent access is as fast as similar apps implemented in Javascript. another big advantage of the Java-enviroment is the possibility of accessing local files and printers directly, which results in a greatly increases user-convenience (most other web-office solutions rely on PDF-export for printing).

outperforming most AJAX-competition, each module reassembles what I’ld guess are the most commonly used features of Microsoft Office. highlights include page-header/-footer, free positioning of text-boxes, multi-column layouts, spellchecker, auto-correction, style-templates and document-zoom. ThinkFree really feels more like a desktop-application than an extended richtext-editor. what’s even better: ThinkFree imported my existing Word- & Powerpoint-files with an amazing accuracy, way better than others did, albeit not as good as OpenOffice.

besides solid oldschool-functionality, ThinkFree offers modern read/write-sharing of documents, management of document-revisions, blogging-capabilites, del.icio.us- & flickr-integration and a social publishing-facility (think digg for documents).

sure, in these web2.0-days, Java-based applications are probably not perceived as very ’sexy’. but compared to 1997, bandwidth and CPU-power aren’t big issues anymore, so I don’t see why there shouldn’t be a renaissance of Java-powered office-solutions - especially since ThinkFree is combining up2date collaboration with a core-featureset superior to most competition.

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

as of today, Google re-opened public access to their online word-processor Writely (via TechCrunch). beta-access was closed down to invitation-only after Writely’s aquisition earlier this year. from what I can see, there haven’t been any changes in functionality since my review a few weeks ago, which means that Writely continues to be probably the best online-app for word-processing. however it means also, that Writely is still far from replacing desktop-apps like Microsoft Word. this is mainly because of the extremely reduced featureset, leading to screw-ups when importing existing documents which go beyond minimalistic formatting. don’t believe me? at least now you can try it out yourself

first released august 2005, online text-processor Writely has been one of the first attempts of moving desktop-office-apps to the web. initial hype among web2.0-evangelists eventually peaked in an aquisition by Google in march 2006. since than, Writely kept quite stable (not to say stalled) - it hasn’t got any new major features, isn’t integrated with Google’s CI and other services, and still isn’t open to the public. if you are interested in trying out Writely, drop me a comment for an invitation.

word-processing features

Writely covers only basic text-formatting like font-styles, paragraph-alignment, bullets and enumerations. moreover it offers five paragraph-styles (header 1-3, Normal and Blockquote) which can’t be customized, effectively preventing the formatting of larger documents. there’s a table-editor, a spell-checker for english language and support for images and hyperlinks. all together the featureset is comparable to that of Zoho Writer (which means: it’s basically a WYSIWYG-blog-editor).

document management & collaboration

similar to GMail, Writely’s document manager allows to archive, ’star’ and tag files. documents emailed to a user-specific email-address (…@prod.writely.com) are automatically saved to the workspace, great for quickly importing loads of documents. import of Word-documents seems to work ok for simple files - problems occur when source-documents contain elements like headers or footers, which are currently not represented in Writely. documents can be exported to HTML, Word, OpenOffice, PDF and RTF, plus there even is a print-view.

the collaboration features work similar to Google Spreadsheets: after email-invitation, several users can edit documents simultaneously. the latency for synchronizing updates seems to be quite high though (>15 seconds), leading to mutual conflicts when a particular paragraph is edited by several users. the revision management (including revision-history, color-highlighting of each collaborateurs changes and RSS-feeds to track documents) emphasizes Writely’s aim at teams.

currenty Writely satisfies only very basic requirements for text-processing. if Google plans to further integrate their toolset (GMail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Writely…), creating a lightweight web-office-suite, they will definitely have to improve each app’s featureset. at the moment I really can’t imagine using Writely for more than as an instant document-viewer on-the-go, the experience creating or editing documents just is too inferior. however, the collaboration-features are promising, leaving the question why Microsoft still hasn’t managed to extend their products in that direction (in a web-based way).

Thumbstacks was one of the first web-apps for building simple presentations online. since its review on TechCrunch in march 2006, the AJAX-application hasn’t received any of the announced updates, leading to the conclusion that Thumbstack is a prove-of-concept currently in hibernation.

the featurelist includes text-boxes which can be moved and formatted freely, bulletlists and enumerations, image-import and template-slides (=content-elements which are automatically displayed on every slide). moreover, Thumbstacks offers two gimmicks: the flickr-integration, which included my images in slides without even entering my flickr-credentials (using the browser-cookies) works great. the google-maps plugin is a nice but rather useless idea, as I wasn’t able to customize the displayed map-snippet by entering coordinates or searching for non-US places. unlike many other office web-apps, Thumbstacks offers decent print-functionality. on the downside, it lacks any import or export-features.

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

Zoho Writer

the text-processor offers basic features regarding text-formats (font, size, color etc.), paragraph-alignment, listings and enumerations. image-upload and -positioning works smoothly, unlike the integrated table-editor which needs some improvements (f.e. I wasn’t able to delete multiple rows). Zoho Writer feels more like a richtext-editor for blogs than a fully-fledged word-processor, but compared to some competitors it offers some unique features, like (english) spell-checking and a search-and-replace function - both of high importance when planning to replace a desktop-word-processor. import of Word-files even messes up documents with simple layouts, export to PDF - the only way to print your documents - works quite good (though there’s a minor bug requiring to save your doc before exporting). Besides file-export, Zoho Writer allows to send documents to blogs (Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal…) or share them publicly/privately.

Zoho Show

Zoho’s presentation-builder contains similar text-formatting-options like the Writer-app. Zoho Show allows to create slide-templates containing headers, logos etc. which are applied to all individual slides. text, images and bullet-lists are organized in independent frames which can be freely dragged around the slide. however, the user-interface is quite clunky. editing the content of a text-frame requires to right-click the frame and select ‘edit’ - users familiar with Powerpoint and such will be alienated by such intricacy. slideshows can be viewed (almost-) fullscreen using cursor-keys and spacebar to swift through slides. Zoho currently offers no way to export slideshows.

Zoho Sheet

there are loads of competitors in the online-spreadsheet market (f.e. Google Spreadsheets or WikiCalc). Zoho Sheet offers most features you’ld expect a web-spreadsheet to contain: formatting of cells (very basic, f.e. no spanning cells), loads of numerical, logical and statistical functions and Excel-import (destroying complicated layouts though). what it differentiates it from similar products is the capability to draw basic charts (bar, pie, columns and line). Zoho Sheets exports to pdf, Excel and OpenOffice.

Zoho’s web-office-suite is easily the most complete offering in web-office to date. still, it’s hard to imagine users to replace their desktop-suite with Zoho: file-import of Microsoft Office-files only works with very simple files, printing documents by exporting to pdf is long-windend, and there are plenty of features even an average user will miss. most of these problems are shared by all upcoming web-office-apps I’ve seen to date. what’s a bit disappointing is the current low grade of integration within Zoho-apps. the user-interfaces of the three main-apps not only look very different, but also follow differing design-paradigms (f.e. Zoho Sheet doesn’t offer context-menus on right-mouse-clicks, while Show and Writer do). in addition, the supported features for sharing and exporting documents aren’t consistent among the apps.
still, I encourage everyone interested in web-office to try out Zoho, especially the Writer- and Sheet-apps offer unique features the competition doesn’t have (yet).

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

dabble db is a web-based tool for data-management, -collection and -sharing, aimed at corporate information-workers which are currently organizing data among small teams using Microsoft Access or similar software. since Access’ initial launch in 1992 (click to read about the products’ history), Microsoft has done quite an amazing job in enabling database-amateurs with profound insight into business-processes to realize data-driven applications - without the cost of involving IT-departments or external services. sure, Access’ database-engine has been critized by pro-developers since day one (and rightly so). and yes, ad-hoc data-models designed by the typical Access-user tend to break. but still I think that Access is the most significant part of Microsoft’s Office-suite regarding empowerment of the user. surely it is the Office-application which is hardest to replace (either by opensource- or webbased-solutions).

dabble db migrates the spirit of early versions of Microsoft Access into todays web 2.0-reality. users are encouraged to start entering data right away, even without designing table-definitions or inter-table-dependencies. the data-model (which at its core is of course still based on a relational data-model, although ‘tables’ are called ‘categories’ which might lead to confusion at first) evolves iteratively, adding columns or references whenever they are needed. dabble’s AJAX-driven user-interface and the whole design-concept are really worth a look, a comprehensive screencast can be found here…

naturally, dabble’s biggest advantange are its features for sharing databases on the web. databases can be shared with specified users (invitation via email) or with the general public (read-only or even writeable). these collaborative features give dabble an advantage over Access, which is mostly still bound to local/corporate networks.
in it’s current state, dabble db addresses only the very basic needs of data-management. it is a great tool for distributed data-collection on the net. however, compared to desktop-applications, the feature-set is extremely limited - no customized forms, no reports, no scripting. currently there is no way to integrate images or other multimedia-data into dabble db. what might detain dabble’s success even more: it is actually costing money (starting with 25 US$ a month for a multi-user license, free trials are available). still, many applications can be solved with the current featureset sufficiently, so the next time you are in need of a simple collaborative data-management-tool while lacking a budget, you might give it a try!

‘(Microsoft) Office is dead!’ - that seems to be the mantra of many web 2.0-apps. but can current web-office-applications really substitute an office-suite with a decades-long history of improvement and extension? over the next weeks, I’m going to review several popular web-apps to see if that’s the case, starting with Google Spreadsheets, which recently was introduced by Google Labs. while Spreadsheets is currently not actively marketed as a product, I bet Google plans tight integration into GMail, similar to recent acquisition Writely.

usability & featureset

basic editing-functions and many keyboard-shortcuts for entering data into the sheet are comfortably similar to Microsoft Excel. the product currently offers only very basic format-options like a few fonts, text- & background-color and text-alignment. more complex layouts are prevented by the lack of features like setting the border-color. Spreadsheet supports loads of mathematical and statistical functions, but misses to integrate contextual help on how they are used (i.e. Spreadsheets doesn’t display each functions arguments).

Google obviously advocates the paper-less office, since Spreadsheets doesn’t offer a print-function. trying to export to HTML and use the browsers built-in printing isn’t an option either, since the original column-widths are not reassembeld correctly. besides HTML, Spreadsheets exports also to .CSV- and Excel-files.
on an average Windows-PC, Google Spreadsheets is feeling quite responsive. supported browsers include Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox 1.0.7+ and Netscape 7.2+ - Safari is currently not supported.

import of excel-sheets

while many layout-formats are not imported correctly (f.e. basic things as cells spanning serveral rows or columns), Spreadsheet handles formulas and functions sufficiently, as well as regional differences regarding date-format and decimal point. graphs of any sort are not imported at all, special characters are lost in translation. in its current state, Spreadsheet does a good job importing excel-files mainly containing pure data, but fails miserably when it comes to adapting even basic formatting & layout.

collaborative features

spreadsheets can be shared (read-only or writeable) with other users simply by sending them invitations via email (all collaborators are required to have GMail-accounts though). what’s really cool is the ability for users to synchronously edit the same sheet. data entered by a contributor just pops up on the screen of each user currently working on the same sheet. an additional chat-sidebar allows live-communication between the collaborators. while the latency is quite low (about one second), I would appreciate if the changes each user made would be represented in different colors.

it’s important to note that Google Spreadsheet is not a finished product, not even feature-complete as a ‘beta’ normally would be. however, the user-interface looks very promising and the possibility of realtime-collaborative editing gives Spreadsheets a fresh twist. users of GMail will probably see the integration of Spreadsheets into the mail-application as an instant file-viewer sooner or later. until that happens, I recommend everyone interested in the state of AJAX-based webapps to try it out!