Live Presentations: What an Online Office Suite Should Look Like
The current crop of online office suites from Google, Zoho, or ThinkFree is quite usable, but most of these products still feel very limited compared to the power of Microsoft's Office products. The newest entrant in this market, Live Documents, however, is trying to change this by developing a fully featured online/offline office suite. Yesterday, Live Documents, which was co-founded by Sabeer Bhatia, who famously sold Hotmail to Microsoft in 1998, released its first product: Live Presentations.
Challenging Microsoft
Live Documents was announced with a lot of hype in November 2007. At that time, Live Documents' CTO Adarsh Kini claimed that the company would challenge Microsoft by breaking "Microsoft's proprietary format lock-in and builds a bridge with other document standards such as Open Office.
Features
As the name implies, Live Presentations is a fully-featured presentation package, that is both available online and offline. The online application runs on Adobe Flash, while the desktop application is based on Adobe AIR.
Because it is built on Flash and Adobe AIR, Live Presentations' interface designers were able to create a far more compelling user experience than most of the AJAX office suites.
Live Presentations' feature set is pretty close to what you would expect from a desktop office application, with support for themes, notes, outlines, graphs, shapes, animations, and more. You can also import images from Flickr, import PowerPoint and OpenDocument presentations, and export files as PowerPoint, OpenDocument, PostScript, or Flash files.
Interestingly, the AIR-based desktop application has fewer features than the online version (you can't access themes, for example), though it is still gives you a reasonable sub-set of Live Presentations' functionality.
Collaboration
No online office suite would be complete without extensive collaboration features. For now, however, these features seem to be limited to sharing documents and online chats. Also, updates made by one user don't directly appear on the collaborators' desktops, which is a feature we would have really liked to see. Live Presentations' documentation also hints at the option to give remote presentations, though we weren't able to access this feature.
Pricing
Live Documents is available for free and provides you with 100MB of online storage. For $6.99 a month, you can get 500MB of storage, as well as support by email.
Verdict: Lots of Potential, But Still Buggy
While we really like the feature set and user interface of Live Presentations, the software is still a bit too buggy. Sometimes, for example, changing themes would not work, or our slides would disappear from the sidebar. So while we would recommend giving Live Presentations a try, we wouldn't recommend that you sign up for a paid account just yet.
We do think, however, that the Live Documents suite, thanks to its easy to use user interface and support for offline editing, has the potential to play a major role in the online office suite market, especially once the team irons out the bugs and adds a word processor and a spreadsheet application.
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Comments
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When Live Documents launched it was just bait for being bought by Microsoft. from the logo,the look, the brand name and the people behind it. those who know the story behind the Hotmail acquisition should know what i mean. but something developed in Flash and Flex has very low chance to get bought by Microsoft now that Silverlight has matured and the Office Division has shown why they are the unstoppable Software Division at Microsoft. if it had been developed in Silverlight. it would have already been bought. from what i know Live Documents aimed to be done in Ajax originally. but the resources and time needed were exponentially higher than those needed for Flash and Flex.
No surprises there. that is why only Zoho and Google have managed to have functional Ajax Office suites and why they evolve slowly.
But they are now a perfect fit for Adobe that is looking for a Office suite to add to Acrobat.com. and Adobe really needs the office suite to give the whole Acrobat project any legs. it would also be good if they stopped fooling around thinking they can make Adobe Share right and just bought Scribd already. so they could start by dominating the Digital Documents space. before trying to take on Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree and now even Apple with iWork!. if they do want to play on the online office war. they would indeed need to buy Live Documents. those two moves would sure make them #2 in no time and maybe even for the foreseeable future.the problem is if they can afford to bought those two right now.
No doubt Online Office Suites, Workspace Collaboration and Digital Documents will be a red hot subject this year. i am eager to see how it unfolds.
Hmmm... seems like a pretty blatant ripoff of SlideRocket but not nearly as good! They even copied SlideRocket's website.
Weird, why just rip off SlideRocket? You'd think they could think of more original RIA's to write. I've tried using LivePresentations and it does seem pretty buggy / unusable, i definitely wouldn't pay for it.
Hearten RWW acknowledges major flaw in all of these online office suite offerings. They are unreliable. That should be priority one, don't you think?
Suggest you consider another look at Zoho.
That organization has over reached, in product offering and feature set. It has missed the point. The technology gets in the way. Zero productivity with Zoho. Take it for a spin and see.
Hope none of the rumours of stolen code are true.
The team of Live Documents hibernate for the whole year and then resurrect but the outcome is so pathetic. I don’t see if they are serious people. Neither big players nor ordinary users will pay any attention if the team can’t brand its product properly. ‘Live documents’ is an excellent name for the product but had they had any understanding as to how important domain names are nowadays, they would have already acquired the name without hyphen. Sabeer Bhatia may have got a lot of money but he also needs some brain in order to use it efficiently.