Blog . Jiboneus

People are talking about Google developing it’s own web office suite. Web office simply means your office on the web.

Imagine your word processor (Microsoft Word for example) is not an application that sits within your computer hard disk space but it’s a web site that you go to. You could type your report and do other word processor stuff you do on your normal Microsoft word on a web site.

Now Imagine spreadsheet application (Microsoft Excel) is a web site too. So does other application that you normally use for day to day normal office work.

Why do in on the web? One obvious reason is that it makes collaboration easy. Sites that offers this type of services are already available, Writely (I’ve talked about it in the past) is nicely done web based word processor that works and feels just like your typical Microsoft Word. Writely now is owned by Google. Google Spreadsheet is a web based spread sheet that works and feels just like Excel. It is of cause own by Google as the name implies. You see where I’m going with this?

A few days back, Google just announced Google Apps for Your Domain. This might just be the first step Google is taking in deploying a full blown web based office suite. According to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.

Google Apps for Your Domain offers small businesses a private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools. According to Aaron Ricadela at InformationWeek, Google is planing to incorporate their Writely and Spreadsheet products into the suite. Gmail user when receive a document be it a word or spreadsheet, they could open it in Google’s new suite.

So this so called web office suite by Google is a combination of other Google products that could be deployed under your domain. Right now the suite offers, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Page Creator. Who know later on we will see Writely and Google Spreadsheet to be included in the suite.

Other major players in this area would be none other then Microsoft itself. Office 2007 in coming soon, and it has some collaborative function in it. Microsoft also has announce Office Live.

Another player to watch out for is Zoho. They are building up its suite of products quite nicely. Check out Zoho Writer, Zoho Show, Zoho Sheet and Zoho Projects. Zoho seems to have all the pieces, they just need to put them together.

In the future, people will be working on the web, so better be ready for it.

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