Siolon

The Online Office Journey

The move­ment dubbed “Office 2.0″ along­side “Web 2.0″ is a array of appli­ca­tions that aim to increase desk­top pro­duc­tiv­ity with­out a desk­top. The aver­age busi­ness man is no longer bound by geo­graph­i­cal bound­aries, and his respec­tive office should reflect that.

The Jour­ney

I decided I was tired of e-mailing doc­u­ments to dif­fer­ent com­put­ers to work on them. I wanted a sin­gle sign-on place to work on my office doc­u­ments (par­tic­u­larly word pro­cess­ing but also spread­sheets and pre­sen­ta­tions). I need a place to work on these doc­u­ments in a “live” fash­ion. I wanted to hit save and push it to a server that could be accessed any­where with a browser and inter­net connection.

I started with Zoho. Actu­ally, I was com­par­ing, at that time, Writely (now bought by Google), with Zoho; but I ulti­mately went with Zoho. It was a decent appli­ca­tion. The Ajax made it quite fast, but it always lacked inter­op­er­abil­ity, a famil­iar UI, and I didn’t like the pre­sen­ta­tion appli­ca­tion (Zoho Show). I used it for a while, and it did the job; but it didn’t appease me. One of the biggest things was the export fea­ture was hor­ren­dous, and I couldn’t put in my needed foot­notes (a necessity).

I then went to Think Free. Even though it was slower due to the Java, the UI was more like MS Word, the export fea­ture was really good, and I could add my trea­sured foot­notes. The inter­op­er­abil­ity prob­lem was still there. I couldn’t cut ‘n paste from one of the doc­u­ments to another retain­ing for­mat­ting, val­ues, etc. They did dras­ti­cally improve the back end by allow­ing the user an actual “office” with access to all your doc­u­ments (word pro­cess­ing, spread­sheets, and pre­sen­ta­tions) in one spot (to be fair, Zoho now has Zoho Note­book). I could also cre­ate fold­ers and other cool stuff. Over­all, I was very happy with Think Free.

Then Why Would I Switch?

At work we use MS’ Team Foun­da­tion Server for devel­op­ers. It is an amaz­ing appli­ca­tion, and it uses Share­Point natively for all the doc­u­ment col­lab­o­ra­tion. I loved using Share­Point, because instead of hav­ing to emu­late MS Office I was actu­ally using it! The inte­gra­tion into the OS was also a nice sur­prise; all the Office prod­ucts allow dynamic col­lab­o­ra­tion inside the application.

I got more addicted to Share­Point when I found out that they just made ver­sion 3 of Win­dows Share­Point Ser­vices free for any­one with the Server 2003 OS. I down­loaded, installed, and loved it. Ver­sion 3 is amaz­ing! The web parts made it a great dynamic tool, and I am a big fan of the UI. But I had prob­lems access­ing it exter­nally which defeated the whole pur­pose (I had prob­lems with the URL in the load balancing).

I knew I would never find Share­Point host­ing free or rea­son­ably price—until recently. Enter FreeSharePoint.com. It really is a no-strings attached Share­Point work­space (ver­sion 2)! The lim­i­ta­tions are 25MB and 5 users, but for sim­ple doc­u­ment man­age­ment it is plenty. Plus you can cre­ate work­spaces, add tasks, con­tacts, and much more; and it inte­grates seam­lessly with the Win­dows OS and Office!

Con­clu­sion

If you want a vir­tual office like MS Office then just use it! That’s what makes Share­Point such a pow­er­ful tool. In the world of col­lab­o­ra­tion tools–SharePoint rules.

(Editor’s Note: Mad props to my co-worker Justin Kohnen for show­ing me WSS 3 and work­ing out the kinks.)