Office on the web
A new trend to collaborative enterprise wide working culture is catching up on the web. A new trend, all Blue-Giants are looking at. A trend to empower the common people to create, update and share there work in a collaborative fashion and enhance the overall team efficiency to a new high level.Global giants like Microsoft and Google are all ready on the race, though Microsoft is ahead of Google with it’’s beta version of products like Office Live at present. but Google is also catching up very fast with it’’s hosted email service for organizations and there are signs of an impending Google Calendar product and Page Creation service.Sound interesting, then you can also try a few all ready on the web for FREE. Writely, NumSum, IRows, BaseCamp, Zimbra, Goowy to name a few of them. All Most all are trying to catch up the trend of collaborative CMS on the web.We can categorized the Services as, Web Email, Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Calendar, Presentations, Project Management and some Mini-Suites.Web Email.Though there are some hosted email application like Webmail.us and Sproutit.com but Gmail is evolving as best choice for it’’s features like tagging, searching, IM and desktop client integration etc.Word ProcessingI would like to give 8 out of 10 to Writely for it’’s features like import and export into Word format, embedded images, a WYSIWYG editor, drag and drop functionality, sharing documents, tagging, convert to PDF. Though there are some other services like Writeboard, Rallypoint, and JotSpot Live.SpreadsheetNumSum and iRows are good to check, and both provide collaborative editing. The other you can check are JotSpot Tracker and TrimSpreadsheet..CalendarIn this service front you can find a lot of competing services like 30 Boxes, Airset ,CalendarHub, Hula, Joyent, Kiko, Planzo, SpongeCell and Trumba. But my bet is on CalendarHub.PresentationsThis is a category in which it is very hard to find out some really good services. S5 a service model is there as “A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System”. It’’s based on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But it’’s not a product. SlideML is an XML format for Slideshows. Anshinsoft has a product called REPro, which does not falls under collaborative hosted app model, but they have there Powerpoint format support in their reporting solution which could become a good alternative option for them who are really finding a pre-formatted presentation software on web.Project Management37Signal’’s Basecamp is only reliable services at the moment as far as my Googlying capability is concern.Mini-SuitesZimbra a collaborative communication suite with very impressive communication tools for enterprise with a heft API set for future development and integration. gOffice is a good choice also to start up for it’’s features like word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and Desktop publishing. Goowy is the alternative if you are keen on interface that you are working on.