Online Office apps: Challenges/Misconception and Future

October 5, 2007

By sinha

Office 2.0 battle is heating up. And we are launching a series of post covering the challenges in online office suite of products, new developments as well as review of online office products.

What’s office 2.0 and why the heck are we taking it online?

Wikipedia defines office 2.0 as :

“A web office is a set of applications hosted on a server that enable users to create, edit and share information. The data resides on a web server, and is a move towards cloud computing. It is a derivative of the Desktop Office Suite, but has more collaboration capabilities due to its Web nature.”

The keywords are: hosted app, data resides on web server & collaboration

Online office (a.k.a office 2.0), instead of being a pure alternative to MS office is rather an attempt to enhance productivity and collaboration among teams.

Is it fair to call online office an AJAXified version of Desktop office?
Not really.

Why is Office 2.0 considered sexy?

Because Microsoft Office can suck your pocket (and everything else..). Leaving all the “sexy” reasons (like AJAXified UI) aside, Office 2.0 drastically reduces the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of the product.

Look at it this way – each license of MS Office costs $400+, and you also need to have a dedicated IS for maintaining the licenses/servers etc. On the other hand,online office is stripped of all these constraints.
You don’t need to worry about the licensing cost, and you don’t even need to maintain your own servers (and a dedicated system admin team)

Another major USP of office 2.0 is that it enhances collaboration. As companies expand and embrace global workforces, we see overloads of email/IM/conf calls; or put it other way, overload is an indicator of communication failure (don’t we see the same doc being emailed a number of times?).

Online office simplifies the collaboration effort by breaking collaboration at a granular level – i.e. have an online repository of the doc with a permission list (that can be defined ‘on-the-fly).

Challenges in Office 2.0 adoption?

Like any new product, Office 2.0 apps demand a significant change in user behavior and hence slow with adoption. As far as businesses are concerned, enterprise adoption is the toughest nut to crack, since most of the buying decisions are made by CIOs/IT decision makers who I am sure will not even think about Online office before 2008.

All said and done, online office will see the initial adopters in SMBs and SOHOs; fueled by increasing broadband penetration and exposure to RIAs.

Having said that, one of the biggest hurdle in online office business is the distribution of these apps. Companies like Google and Microsoft will cash on their brand name and partnerships, but it would be interesting to see how other players like Zoho create awareness of their offerings.

Misconceptions?

TechCrunch reported sometime back about SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley act) compliance concern with Office 2.0 apps. That’s not at all a valid point, since SOX doesn’t mandate you to keep your records in your own servers (if that’s the case, salesforce.com would have gone bust).

What’s next from us? Review of online office products and strategic overview of key players in the market.

Tell us what do you want to see specifically about online office apps.
online office, office 2.0

Tags: office 2.0, online office

| More

Jonathan on October 5, 2007 at 11:57 pm

True SOX does not mandate you keep records on your own servers, but it does require that you “Evaluate controls over the safeguarding of assets” including an in-depth analysis of workflow, and fraud prevention controls.

Without speaking from direct knowledge I have to believe that Salesforce has gone through this process, while it is hard for me to accept that any of the online office vendors have. Furthermore, there are plenty of other government regulations that would affect the protection and security of documents – HIIPA for one.

While all of these recent announcements (IBM/OpenOffice, Adobe/Buzzword, MS Office Live, Google Presently, Zoho) are interesting news items, each solution is missing two major components – the offline/online capabilities, and an on-premise solution.

ThinkFree is the only office suite vendor that has these options. We have the widest variety of deployment options of anyone – online, offline, hybrid (offline/online), on-demand (ThinkFree hosted), on premise (hosted by a portal, web service, or behind a company firewall), desktop, portable, and mobile.

ThinkFree Premium allows you to create and edit office documents offline. We also automatically synchronize files between your desktop and online account. None of the other office vendors have this, not Google, Microsoft, or Adobe. After synchronizing the documents online you can share, collaborate and publish your work.

ThinkFree Server runs on premise. Large organizations like the LA City Public Library and Ryder Trucking host the applications in central locations within their own network. Hundreds and thousands of computers then access those servers to run the applications from remote locations. No other office vendor has these capabilities.

Our free service, ThinkFree Online, has the highest level of MS Office compatibility available and the deepest functionality of any online office suite. These capabilities have allowed us to become the second largest online office suite after Google.

kalivd on October 9, 2007 at 7:56 pm

Now that even IBM also has launched its online office software which needs to be downloaded and involves a lot of offline work to be done… well there are other online office suites which do not require any download and is highly compatible with spreadsheets, MS Word and many other apps.. for eg you can consider eDeskOnline which is a cool online office suite which is worth a try.. You can ven synchronise your mobile contacts with your edesk account which gives you a safe backup of contacts in case you loose your sim card and other unavoided unfortunate circumstances, you can even access your eDeskOnline through mobile which should be GPRS enabled handsets….

kalivd on October 9, 2007 at 7:58 pm

http://www.edeskonline.com/index_online_office.asp

buzzlicias » Blog Archive » Online Office apps: Challenges/Misconception and Future on October 21, 2007 at 8:19 pm

[...] You can read more here [...]