Raju posted about an InfoWorld analysis of alternatives to MS office. What makes the analysis interesting is that for the first time (that I’ve seen) cloud based and Open Source products have been evaluated side by side.
As is often the case with these sorts of analyses, it’s what is left unsaid that is arguably more important than what is said.
Some things I’d like mentioned or assessed to make a comparison more meaningful;
An analysis of the benefits to be gained from the cloud based nature of two of the offerings (ability to mine web data etc)
The release cycle of cloud based vs Open Source software
A comparison of all four offerings in relation to MS Office itself
The InfoWorld analysis looked at the main productivity (documents, spreadsheet and presentation) - it didn’t look at associated offerings from the same vendors (Zoho business, Google’s other offerings etc). As Raju pointed out in his post, if you look where the cloud based apps have come from in only a couple of years, it’s plain to see that their development velocity is far higher than the installed competitors - extrapolate that fact out for another few years and we’re sure to see cloud based apps streak ahead of the competitors - the one question that remains is what is Microsoft’s strategy around S+S for MS Office?
Stuart alerted me to the fact that Google has released templates for Google docs. Google has created a number of templates across it’s various offerings (documents, spreadsheets, presentations). I’m stoked to see Google roll this out - it’s another feature that levels the playing field between the on-demand offerings and Microsoft office. Have a look at the list of templates available from Google it’s pretty comprehensive already.
As I say it’s a fantastic initial offering - what would really add some secret sauce would be if Google allowed their own users to create (and save) their own templates - I’d love to have a letterhead template sitting in Google docs for instance. Watch this space…
Call it observed parallelism, call it different ways of getting to the same place but either way, hot on the heels of Zoho opening up it’s services to Google and Yahoo account holders, Google has just advised that it is now possibly to view a spreadsheet directly from the URL (ie without being invited and logging in).
I have a situation where I run a cashflow sheet in Google docs, other people in my organisation need to access it but don’t like to use their Google accounts (no idea why - late adopters maybe!)
This feature will allow them to access the document without logging in - yay!
Obviously people need to think a little of the security ramifications of this but it’s an interesting development. Some folks are having a play on an open Google doc over here - check it out!
Announced today that Google docs now supports customisation of style sheets. This change opens up the templating and styling options that have always been available in word, but does so obviously in an easy to collaborate, available anywhere, in the clouds way.
See some examples over here. I have to say that the differences between the traditional office productivity offerings, and the on-demand ones, are narrowing rapidly (especially in the case of text editing). For all but the highest level users, the on-demand solutions should now fulfil all their requirements.
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