At the Office 2.0 Conference today, Web Office vendor Zoho will unveil a new Suite product called Zoho Business. It will be available in two versions - Free and Pro. Both versions will be free until Zoho has sorted out the feature set for Pro over the beta period, expected to last until Q1 2008. At that point the Pro version will have a charge - mooted to be $40/user/year.
Zoho Business is a set of online office applications, similar to Google Apps. It will probably undercut Google Apps in price - at $40/user/year, it would be $10 per user cheaper than Google Apps. Zoho Business will be available in private beta for now, then move into public beta next month. It will go 1.0 during Q1 2008.
As yet the features for the Pro version haven't been confirmed. But Zoho told Read/WriteWeb that it'll include additional storage, security, telephone support, additional apps, customization and more control, more flexibility and control in groups, and more. These features will evolve as the Web Office market evolves over the next few months, we were told.
It looks like Google will shortly be adding a wiki to their web office application suite. Google acquired JotSpot, a provider of hosted wikis, last October, and signs now point to a re-launch of the service as Google Wiki. Google Blogoscoped noticed that "jotspot" is now a Google Apps service code, and if you try to log in to the service you're treated with a rather poorly-sized Google Wiki logo.
Google said in July that it would be adding JotSpot to Google Apps, so this doesn't come as much of a surprise. The Google Operating System blog speculates that the launch will be timed with an announcement at this weekend's Office 2.0 event in San Francisco.
This is Web Office Week here at Read/WriteWeb, but some of you may not be 100% sure what a Web Office is. Even the Wikipedia definition is a bit bare bones, so in this post I'm going to take a crack at defining 'Web Office'. What I ended up with is this:
A Web Office suite is a combination of productivity, publishing and collaboration features. A Web Office both embraces the functionality of desktop office suites (e.g. Microsoft Office) and extends it by using Web Native features.
But let's start at the beginning. Wikipedia currently states that a Web Office "is a set of applications hosted on a server that enable users to create, edit and share information. It is a derivative of the Desktop Office Suite, but has more collaboration capabilities due to its Web nature."
It then lists a very broad set of applications that might be considered part of a Web Office - everything from word processing to blogs to CMS to wiki to email to CRM and accounting. I think this is too broad a definition - for example a CMS (content management system) is an office application, and it may be a part of a company Intranet, but we wouldn't normally associate it with an office suite.
This week Read/WriteWeb will be featuring a series of posts about the Web Office. Let's start by summarizing what exactly is a Web Office. In a June post we mentioned that a Web Office suite should have, at the least, the following apps in it: email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations. These are the core products of Microsoft Office, the dominant office suite package. You could also make a case for apps like contacts manager, task manager or even project management to be in the core products, but we'll keep things real simple. Here's how the main Web Office contenders shape up:
Web Office suite provider ThinkFree has announced it has hit the 1 Million mark in number of hosted documents, up from 654,000 in late February when we last reported ThinkFree's usage. Their community uploads between 60,000 to 80,000 documents per month and currently ThinkFree has 335,000 users, up from the 250,000 in February.
ThinkFree also stated in their blog post that they are the number 2 Web Office suite provider, behind Google Apps. They wrote:
"GD&S is a great lightweight tool, but having the best MS Compatibility and the highest level of feature functionality of any online offie suite has propelled us into the second spot."
The Google Operating System blog noted that Sun's StarOffice suite of productivity tools has been added to the free Google Pack offering. StarOffice is a direct competitor to Microsoft Office, as it is a full suite of desktop-based office apps that normally retails for $70. It includes word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats, except for the formats introduced in Office 2007. It is however only available to Windows users.
As Google Operating System pointed out, Google is not using OpenOffice; an open source project sponsored by Sun based on StarOffice's source code, released in 2000. GOS states that "the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org [is] that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration."
I want to replace both my Windows laptop and my Blackberry with an iPhone. I love my Blackberry, but I don’t like lugging my laptop around. I know I need a laptop sometimes, but if I can just leave it behind more times that will be a big improvement. I think this is a reasonably typical use case. Mobility is the key driver.
I have faith that iPhone will get decent connectivity at some point and that the aftermarket will create a neat foldable keyboard for times when the touch-screen is not enough. So what I need to figure out is: when that happens, who will be my Web Office provider?
Personally, I will only trust a big vendor. Sorry to all the start-ups with cool new Web Office stuff and I hope one of the big guys buys you. My data is just too critical to trust to a company that might disappear, change policy significantly or simply not keep up with the emerging requirements. So with that in mind, the contenders out there currently are:
A few reports are circulating that Microsoft will offer a free, ad supported version of Microsoft Works, its 'lite' office suite, within the next few months. However the kicker is that it won't be a browser-based offering - as the rumor was back in September 2006. The free version of Microsoft Works will be a desktop app; and Microsoft will go back to its tried and true tactic of pre-installing it on PCs - it's not known yet which PC makers will be involved. Adverts will run within the programs, including the flagship word processing and spreadsheet apps.
The BBC reports that the service will debut with Version 9.0 of Works, which is due to launch by the end of the year. BBC says that "the ad-supported version will have a store of adverts it will show to people while they put together documents or spreadsheets. The store of ads would be refreshed every time that computer goes online."
A new Forrester report states that Instant Messenging (IM) is by far the most valuable 'web 2.0' tool for enterprises:
"Web 2.0 tools and technologies are the latest in a long line of technologies that have taken root with consumers who then smuggle them into the business world. IM is one notable example. To this point, the Web 2.0 tools that we inquired about fall well short of the value that businesspeople associate with IM. Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported substantial business value from IM, compared with an average of just 16% for the other Web 2.0 tools."
The report was compiled based on feedback from 275 IT decision-makers. Other than IM, the report found that RSS and podcasting showed "the highest average business value", while social networking and blogging showed the lowest. RSS is mostly being used in enterprises for corporate communications or content aggregation, while only one in three Forrester respondents uses RSS for external marketing purposes.
Web Office suite vendor ThinkFree has offered 50 invites to get into the ThinkFree Premium closed beta. The first 50 respondees who send an email to the inbox readwriteweb@thinkfree.com will get a fully-licensed version of ThinkFree Premium to evaluate. I'm not sure at this point how long the evaluation period is, so I've sent an email to ThinkFree to clarify that (* see update below). But in any case Web Office fans should check this out. ThinkFree Premium's main benefit is its offline support, so you can use it on the desktop similar to Microsoft Office. It also features file synchronization, backups, tech support and more.
