Tonight’s Fox6 Tech Check: Online Office Apps
On Fox6 Birmingham tonight, Sam and I talked about the shift from running office applications on your computer to running them online through a browser.
To understand more about online office programs, I recommend that you read this article: Web Office Week by ReadWriteWeb. You might also check out their article called: 10 must have online office apps.
The biggest player in the Online Office program sweepstakes is Google, of course. You can find their Office Suite linked below this blog post:
Of course Microsoft also has their version of Office online called Microsoft Office Live.
We also mentioned Zoho.com, which has a great collection of online apps, including a free online CRM program and other goodies.
Thinkfree is also worth checking out, and bills itself as an online competitor alternative to Microsoft Office. As noted in our comment section below, they ” are the only office suite provider that has multiple deployment models: online, offline, hybrid (online/offline), on-premise (behind a company firewall), on-demand, desktop, portable, mobile.”
Thanks for watching tonight’s Fox6 Tech Check!
September 20th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Chase and Janet,
Thanks for mentioning ThinkFree. Just to be clear, we don’t really see ourselves as a competitor to Microsoft, more of an alternative. There are certainly things you can do in MS that you can’t in ThinkFree - macros, pivot tables, things like that.
But, there are also things that ThinkFree offers that Micrsofot does not. We are the only office suite provider that has multiple deployment models: online, offline, hybrid (online/offline), on-premise (behind a company firewall), on-demand, desktop, portable, mobile.
We are also the only office suite that has tailored the user experience to provide different levels of access to meet the needs for your use case: Power Edit (Java), Quick Edit (AJAX), HTML, PDF conversion, and Flash.
Coupled with the deepest level of MS Office compatibility, and the highest level of functionality available online we provide a true alternative for daily use, but in vastly different ways to what Microsoft is doing.
Right now we are in closed beta for ThinkFree Premium (our hybrid suite), which allows you to access the core editors for word documents, spreadsheets, and presentations offline. When you get back online you can synchronize your desktop and online files, and use our free online service (www.thinkfree.com) to share, publish or edit those files from another location.
If you are interested let me know and I will send you a link. If you have any questions please let me know. I would love to get your feedback.
Thanks,
Jonathan Crow
ThinkFree
http://www.thinkfree.com
blog.thinkfree.com