The Online Office

I'm not sure if anyone remembers this, but back in 1995-96 Sun Systems was
promoting and developing office software packages which were hosted on an online
server, where company employees could log in, and do their work. The main selling
point of these packages was that updates, and maintenance could be done on the
company server, and the users would not have to worry about keeping up-to-date.
Also your data files (documents, spreadsheets, databases) were hosted on the
server and could be backed up on your computer.

Sound like I good idea?

Well it flopped, and Sun lost quite a bit of money trying to get it to take
off. There were several reasons for the flop, not the least of which was public
belief and trust in the Internet or the company.

Now, only 10 or so years later Google has your office on line, and the response
is so great they've had to limit the number of users to get enough servers on-line.
First we had Calendar http://www.google.com/calendar, which by the way is probably
the best calendar program I've ever used, but I love simplicity and clean designs,
so some of you may feel it doesn't have enough pep to it.

http://www.google.com/googlespreadsheets http://www2.writely.com/info/WritelyOverflowWelcome.htm


Now we have Writely and Spreadsheets. Both of these are probably going to become
very popular with the high-school and college crowd. You can build your reports
and spreadsheets online, from any Internet Point of Access; laptop at the coffee
shop, campus library, parent's home, friend's home, their apartment, where-ever.
The work can't be lost and can be accessed from any Internet point of access,
so you can't loose it. You can also share it, so several people can work together
on one report or spreadsheet.

Both of these programs work with their MS Office counterparts as well. You
can upload MS Word files to your Writely account and edit them, you can also
upload your MS Excel spreadsheets to your Spreadsheets account and edit them.
While both of these are hosted on an Internet server, you can download your
files to your computer for backup as well, or off-line editing.

Really it is the Sun idea, but Google is making it happen, and the popularity
is growing fast. With all of the viruses, and crashes and malware and just "stuff
that can happen to my work" seemingly building up every day, I have to
admit that the idea and the software have a great deal of attraction for me
as well.

Another idea coming out of the Google Labs is Notebook http://www.google.com/notebook,
which is a utility type program that allows you to build clipping books from
web page sources. So if you are planning a trip to Spain, you can start your
research and collect items, notes, images which are more meaningful than simple
bookmarks.

Notebook
as it turns out is an Extension for the browser. I loaded it on Firefox and
the beta version of IE7, both installations were fine. After browsing around
a while and trying out the tool I've decided that my OneNote is going to suffer
because of this little tool.

I've been using OneNote since the first of the year. I needed something to
capture ideas, and quick research with all the writing I've been working on
(the book and the articles). Having a tool like OneNote has been great, but
now, this is Notebook is very easy to use, it takes in notes and text, and sorts
them into notebooks just like OneNote. It is the only tool I've looked at so
far (in this blossoming of free online software) and thought that it might be
a real threat to a more mainstream application. I didn't see Google Spreadsheets
as much of a threat to Excel or Quatro Pro, and I certainly didn't see Writely
as a replacement for MS Word or WordPerfect. Notebook, probably because it is
so functional, seems to be a very good replacement for the more expensive OneNote.
Your mileage may vary there.

With the creation, and obvious popularity, of these online applications in
main stream business areas, programs that are not susceptible to crashes or
virus infestations, I wonder what the impact is going to be on the way we think
about office software in the near future.