office

Competition comes to the Office market...on two fronts

Microsoft may finally have a real fight on its hands to maintain its Office monopoly. In separate news over the last few days, Capgemini put its muscle behind Google Apps, as Nick Carr details, and today IBM announced that it will be contributing significant resources to the development of OpenOffice.

About time on both counts. Microsoft could use a little competition. It does its best work when it has real competitors.… Read more

IBM adds heft to OpenOffice open-source project

IBM said on Monday that it will join the OpenOffice.org project and pledged to further use the open-source software in its own products.

OpenOffice is an open-source alternative to Microsoft's Office desktop applications suite.

IBM will not be offering support for the product to customers. However, it will make technical contributions to the project and use code from the project in its own tools.

Specifically, IBM said that it will have 35 programmers working on the OpenOffice code and it will contribute software to improve the product for people with disabilities--an important feature, particularly to government customers such … Read more

EchoSign provides paperless paper trail

The Office 2.0 conference was set up almost entirely without paper (except for some checks that paid for sponsorships). Even the contracts necessary to set up the show were signed electronically, using EchoSign. There are other companies that provide services to create legally binding signatures, such as DocuSign (review), but EchoSign has simplicity going for it.

If you want to have a document "signed" electronically, EchoSign will convert it to a PDF, send it to your designated recipient, and give you the option to have it signed via a Web form, or with a pen, via fax. … Read more

Final report: The iPhone is not open for business

At the Office 2.0 conference, as you probably know, every attendee got an iPhone with their paid admission. There was a very useful iPhone-friendly Web site set up, and several companies were showing off shiny new iPhone business applications.

But is the iPhone a business-class product? I talked to the developers making applications for this platform, and to attendees at the conference, and came up with a disheartening answer: It is not. From the two-handed interface to capricious keyboard to the slow Edge network to the lack of a real developer's interface to the phone, it's just … Read more

Jotlet calendar to sync with Outlook

Among the announcements at the Office 2.0 conference this week, Jotlet's online calendars will provide two-way synchronization with Microsoft Outlook later this month. At first glance, the calendars appear elegant and easy to use, with visual niceties such as color coding. Personal accounts are free, while corporate accounts allow a company to use branded Jotlet calendars within their Web sites. While heavily customized calendars such as those displayed during the conference demo might cost in the ballpark of between $100 to $200 per month, Jotlet's prices vary widely with the features and support offered. Jotlet allows user … Read more

Office 2.0: Ismael's secrets...and a live videocast

Ismael Ghalimi, the organizer of the Office 2.0 conference (more) is serious about living the Web 2.0 dream: Aside from a browser, he has no applications installed on his laptop, except for iWork, which he says he uses to remind himself what old-style software is like. (Even I use traditional software for writing and e-mail.)

Check out Ismael's notes on Office 2.0 services that work. And this comprehensive database of Office 2.0 applications that he's put together. Useful tips.

But what if there's no available Internet connection for Ismael when he wants to … Read more

Shiny office toys galore at Office 2.0

For a conference about getting work done, there are sure a whole lot of toys here at Office 2.0 in San Francisco. Sure many of them are old hat, like the the Nabaztag/tag, but there's some new stuff here too like Pano Logic's zero client desktop. This shiny metal cube is actually a computer--well kind of. Actually it involves setting up a a beefy server to give everyone in your office a full version of Windows sans hardware. Just give give them a keyboard, mouse, monitor and one of these shiny cubes and they're ready … Read more

Office 2.0 Launchpad rundown

The Office 2.0 Conference is only two days long, and in that time there are dozens of announcements big and small from a wide array of productivity and business companies. Amidst the bevy of panels, and discussions lies the launchpad event, a small 45-minute time slot carved out for product announcements. It's basically everyone's chance to show off their stuff, or as much as they can in the brief three minute allotments. Here's a rundown:

Zoho, mentioned itsits Zoho Business platform, which they launched this morning. We've got a full story on it here.

Veodia, the live broadcasting folks are launching a new portal for the iPhone and iPod touch. The team has been live broadcasting conference coverage all day.

TimeBridge is launching the public beta of its personal scheduling manager. It's a little bit like CircleUp ( coverage) meets Outlook, to lets you sync up your scheduling decision with your Outlook or Google Calendar. Previous Timebridge coverage can be found here.

Pano Logic has a really neat piece of hardware that does "zero client computing." This means with a server setup, you can get little portable computers that run off of these little metal cubes. This is great for small businesses who want to save some cash on desktop hardware, or who want to fool their employees into thinking they're in the future.

OpenSAM discussed creating an open set of standards for sharing online file types and information. ShareOffice is adding calendars from Jotlet, and conferencing from Persony. They've also built an iPhone app for accessing documents on ShareMethods.

Nozbe announced its business service, which features project collaboration for small and medium sized businesses. The team has also put together an iPhone-friendly version of the site for users to access projects on the go.

gOffice has a really nifty service that lets you type a Microsoft Office document on your iPhone. You can type to your heart's content, add a custom signature, and even get gOffice to print it out and send it (via snail mail) to wherever you want for a small fee.

… Read more

Diigo's WebSlides to turn saved pages into slide shows

The bookmarking and reference service I use most is adding a show-and-tell slideshow feature. Diigo lets you mark up Web pages, then share and export your notes. Its new WebSlides, in closed beta testing, will enable you to create narrated presentations of Web pages that you've saved and annotated.

Diigo is meant to be more practical than something like StumbleUpon, a fun way to discover new sites. Diigo Vice President Maggie Tsai touted Diigo WebSlides at the Office 2.0 conference today as an ideal tool for teachers. Her demo showed off handy-looking recording and playback controls for making … Read more