Productivity posts - The Web Services Report

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August 6, 2008 9:50 AM PDT

Easy as ABC: Web apps for students

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Summer is, unfortunately, almost over and that means that students are starting to head back to school in the coming weeks. There are so many online tools that can help students today to stay more organized and productive that I thought I would outline a few here and hopefully ease the pain of the upcoming school year.

Remember The Milk

Remember The Milk is the best online to-do list out there right now. It plugs into a slew of other services, including their killer Gmail add-on, Netvibes, iGoogle, Jott, offline support with Google Gears, and a promised iPhone standalone app. Given its wide array of features, it should instantly help any student to prioritize their tasks and become more efficient.

Google Docs/Calendar/Gmail/Scholar

I decided to lump all of Google's services that are good for students together. I think that they provide a tremendous amount of value to users and can be put to great use in an academic setting. Google Docs provides a web interface for a suite of tools to make, view, edit, and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. As I've said before, the features of Google Docs might not be on par with its Office counterparts, but it really shines when it comes to sharing and collaboration. This makes it perfect for working on group projects or spreading notes around.

Google Calendar can help keep a student's hectic schedule in line. Managing time is one of the hardest parts of being a student and Google Calendar can help . Did I mention that Remember The Milk integrates with it also?

Gmail includes a lot of great features to keep your incoming stream of email organized and prioritized. Gmail's labels help to keep your email organized and bring attention to those requiring your attention. It's helpful, even if you don't receive a large volume of email.

Google Scholar provides an excellent resource for students, looking for sources for research papers. While most schools already provide resources for students in this department, Google Scholar's excellent search provides a good point of discovery.

Evernote

Evernote is a great new web service to handle all of your notes, photos, and clippings from around the web. It has clients for Mac, PC, and various mobile phones, including the iPhone. Robert Scoble did a nice interview and demo with the company's CEO if you want to get a thorough overview. While it might be hard, at first, to integrate Evernote into your workflow, your productivity and organization will see the benefits.

Easybib

This one is a little bit of an old school pick, but it's an indispensable resource for every student. Easybib lets you pick from a variety of types of sources, then you just fill in all of the information that you can, and Easybib will automatically generate a MLA or APA formatted works cited page.

Facebook

Apart from being the premiere social network for students, Facebook also offers some applications, such as Courses 2.0 and Study Groups that have academic value. These applications leverage Facebook's social networking features in order to connect students for the purpose of studying or collaborating on coursework. Facebook is also a necessity for any college student, if for no other purpose than meeting new people and staying in the loop on parties around campus.

Socialbib

Socialbib is a really interesting service, where students offer up old textbooks that they no longer have a need for and trade them for ones that they do need. This could potentially cut down on otherwise absurdly expensive textbooks for students.

Those are my recommendations for making school life a little easier. Services like these are easing the load put on students and making everything slightly more enjoyable. For the students out there, what web apps do you find yourself using?

Topics:: Tips

Tags:: Productivity

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March 4, 2008 9:48 AM PST

Microsoft goes public with Office Live Workspace beta

by Harrison Hoffman

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Regular readers of this blog know that I don't believe that Google Apps is a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office.

While Microsoft is not releasing a completely online version of its Office on Tuesday, it is releasing Office Live Workspace, an online-collaboration tool for Office that works in cooperation with the desktop application suite.

Workspace enables users to view documents online, even if their computer doesn't have Office installed. However, if they want to make edits, they have to download it and make changes in the appropriate Office application.

For users who have Office installed on their PC, this is not as bad as you would think. It may be a little bit annoying, but the benefit is that they get to work on these documents and collaborate within the fully functional desktop application. The online application will track revisions and comments made on the document.

Microsoft has also made a plug-in available for Office that makes accessing a workspace a bit smoother. It also enables users to edit things such as notes, lists, calendars, tasks, and contacts in the Web application.

(Credit: Microsoft)

A lot of Web 2.0 purists are going to be very quick to dismiss the notion that Office Live Workspace is a legitimate Web application, simply because of its dependence on the desktop version of Office. I would have to disagree with those people.

While it may not be completely Web-based, Workspace offers a lot of value for collaboration on group projects, and it is not limited by online versions of the Office applications. People get to work in an environment that is familiar to them and do not sacrifice any functionality in exchange for collaboration.

Until someone can build a full-feature online-productivity suite, this is certainly a viable option.

Via LiveSide.

Topics:: Microsoft

Tags:: Microsoft,; Office Live,; Collaboration,; Productivity

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November 26, 2007 6:48 AM PST

Zoho Writer gets full offline functionality

by Harrison Hoffman

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Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or Mac from CNET Download.com).

The offline functionality here couldn't be any easier. If you need to go offline, just hit the "Go Offline" button at the top, give Zoho permission to use Google Gears, and you are ready to go. If you make any edits to the documents offline, when you get Internet access again, you just hit the "Go Online" link and there you are! Everything is automatically synced back to Zoho's servers, and you are good to go.

I have used the offline functionality, built on Google Gears, for Google Reader on many occasions, so I am not one bit surprised at how well it works with Zoho. Google has built a killer platform for offline Web applications. Zoho is leading the way right now, offering offline functionality for its word processor, even before Google Apps does. Zoho currently offers 14 online productivity services, so maybe it's time for Microsoft to start taking note.

via VentureBeat