Webware

Microsoft has enjoyed a stranglehold on the Office suite market for well over a decade. But now that the Web is slowly becoming a quasi-replacement for the desktop, Microsoft Office has some stiff competition in the form of online Web Office apps. And although they may not appeal to the spreadsheet maven that relies on Excel's power, each offers functionality that diminishes the need for Microsoft's products.

So, in the time between now and when the software giant delivers the much-anticipated online version of Office, our options are far from few. Here are three that might fit your needs:

Google Documents

Although it's best known for its search and advertising businesses, Google's Office suite is one of the best on the Web.

Creating documents, spreadsheets, or presentations is as simple as signing up for an account and using Google's menu page to decide what to create. The word processor in Google Docs is the standout app. It sports the familiar spelling and grammar check available in Microsoft's Office suite. Even when online, I found operation seamless. Returning to saved files from Google's server meant I could work from any computer at any time -- a luxury that's not so easily attained with Office. The capability to view and save documents in HTML along with Office-compatible file types is also a welcome addition.

But for as appealing as Google Docs is, the company's Spreadsheet and Presentation apps don't offer anywhere near the kind of customization and power already available in Excel or Powerpoint. Spreadsheets can expand to only 600 rows -- a useless amount for many companies -- and although simple formulas like "sum" are available, the product is lacking more sophisticated functionality to make it useful to business professionals.

Google's Presentation app is fine for users that need to create a quick, simple presentation in a short amount of time, but it lacks the power and sophistication of Powerpoint due to its limited number of transitions and templates.

Google Docs is simple and extremely reliable in a pinch. Its collaboration features, including real-time collaborative editing, cannot be beat. But with a laughable spreadsheet app and a barely useful presentation app, it doesn't take long to find out Google Docs is no replacement for Office.

ThinkFree Online

ThinkFree Office Online is not only one of the most respected online Office apps on the market, it's the best. ThinkFree Online offers all the "must-have" features available in Microsoft Office like a rich toolbar, a ruler bar, and an interface that offers simplicity and delivers the same feel as Word, Excel, or Powerpoint. Creating a document is simple and working with spreadsheets is a treat thanks to the tens of thousands of rows it provides, along with just about any formula that comes to mind. That said, ThinkFree Online doesn't support Pivot Tables, which could prove troublesome to those who rely on them. For everyone else, switching from Excel to ThinkFree's spreadsheet app won't require a learning curve nor a concession.

The main issue plaguing ThinkFree Online is that it suffers from performance issues. Although the company claims its app will pop up as quickly as a desktop application, I found it slightly slower than Office 2008 on my Mac. It also took longer to save documents in ThinkFree Online than any other app evaluated in this round-up. Worse, and perhaps the deal-breaker for some, the company's Presentation app is hardly usable and doesn't compare on any level to Powerpoint. In fact, it's even worse than Google's Presentation app.

Though it suffers from some quirks like slow load times and its presentation app is practically useless, ThinkFree Office Online's word processing and spreadsheet apps make up for it and make the company's online suite the best on the Web.

Zoho Office Suite

If online Office suites were measured solely on the number of apps they provide, Zoho would win without any argument. Aside from the basics -- word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations -- Zoho delivers a full-featured Wiki, note taker, organizer, Web conferencing, and more.

While it's nice to have the option of using Zoho for almost any need, its word processor is outstanding and boasts many of the features offered in ThinkFree's app, as well as Microsoft Office. Even better, the apps load quickly and saving happens in a flash. Simply put, Zoho's Writer word processing app is a fine alternative to Word.

For as useful and appealing as Zoho Writer is, the company's spreadsheets and presentation apps fall flat. Zoho's spreadsheet application offers just 50 rows and fails to provide support for complex formulas, though it does support simple operations like "sum" and "average." In essence, Zoho's spreadsheet application is really only useful when an elementary operation needs to be performed and a calculator isn't readily available. And although Zoho's presentation app allows for sharing with friends and groups throughout the world, it offers just a handful of design options, creating a service that offers little customization and even less appeal.

Zoho is simple. And although that may not be a bad thing for those who don't need all the power Office or even ThinkFree Online offer, it's not suited for anyone who needs to go above and beyond simple operations like writing letters or performing simple mathematical operations.

ThinkFree, a company that specializes in "next-gen" office productivity solutions, announced Tuesday that it has launched its ThinkFree Netbook solution, which will deliver word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications for Netbooks running Intel's Atom chipsets, like the Asus Eee PC or the Acer Aspire One.

According to ThinkFree, its Netbook Edition offers a simplified user interface and compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files. Most importantly, the software is optimized for a small screen and features integration with ThinkFree's online service that allows users to collaborate with each other and synchronize documents on-the-go.

The Eee PC has another office productivity suite.

(Credit: Asus)

"In today's digital world, document collaboration and real-time synchronization is a vital part of staying on top of business," Su Jin Kim, ThinkFree's CEO, said in a statement. "Netbook users are demanding applications that are built to not only meet, but make the most of, the unique characteristics of this new device category (and) Netbook OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) can now offer their customers just that by pre-installing a customized, device-tailored version of ThinkFree Netbook Edition."

ThinkFree isn't alone in the market for Netbook office applications. Asus Eee PCs ship with Sun Microsytems' StarOffice (download) installed, and even Open Office (download) can be downloaded onto Netbooks. And as long as users have an Internet connection handy, they can perform office productivity tasks on services like Zoho and Google Docs.

ThinkFree's Netbook Edition is available for Windows XP, Vista, Linux, and Mac OS X and will work fine on 800x480 and 1,024x600 displays. A free trial copy of the software can be downloaded now on the company's site.

Tomorrow, ThinkFree is announcing a partnership with EditGrid to integrate EditGrid's spreadsheet service into ThinkFree's Web-based office suite. EditGrid's free, Web-based spreadsheet service will take the place of ThinkFree's Quick Edit Calc application. Both services are Webware 100 nominees in the Productivity category.

With the partnership comes a profit-sharing agreement between the two companies; however, the real icing on the cake is for ThinkFree users who will get to use EditGrid without having to sign up to another service.

While it's not a merger or an acquisition, the last memorable integration of two popular online office apps was when Google integrated Writely into Google Docs and Spreadsheets late last year. Edit Calc enthusiasts should not be too disappointed with the news, though; ThinkFree will reportedly be delivering an updated and hopefully improved version of Edit Calc later down the road.

Previous ThinkFree coverage:

• ThinkFree now publishes straight to the Web
• ThinkFree, or not

  Previous EditGrid coverage:

• Under the Radar: Battle of the collaboration tools, tryptophan
• EditGrid: A nice competitor to Google Spreadsheets

  [via Startup Squad]

Tomorrow, ThinkFree will announce a new way to publish documents: ThinkFree Docs. The feature looks a lot like Scribd: It's a publicly accessible, YouTube-like document directory. And like YouTube, documents stored on it can be embedded in blogs and Web sites.

ThinkFree creates simple, dedicated pages for hosting office documents.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Docs rounds out the publishing options for the online suite ThinkFree, which already had a method for sharing documents that's much like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, and other online productivity suites: from within the suite, you can e-mail an invitation to other people so they can view or edit your documents on the ThinkFree site. That's what you want for collaboration. But when you want to publish a document to the world at large, you might want the much simpler ThinkFree Docs instead--it will spare viewers unfamiliar with ThinkFree the confusion of using a new service.

You can use Docs independently of the ThinkFree suite. The service does a decent job of displaying standard Microsoft Office (2003 format) files, as well as other formats like PDF and RTF.

As on media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr, shared files all get their own comment threads. Docs' commenting system is rudimentary, though, and the comments are not visible or accessible when a document is embedded on another site. For that matter, very little else is available from an embedded document. There's no way to download a file, nor is there a link to the file's dedicated URL, where the download link, embed codes, and comment board reside. Scribd, by contrast, offers links back to the sharing page on the Scribd site, as well as download and other useful links.

ThinkFree Docs is a useful feature for ThinkFree suite users who want to publish their documents to the Web, but as a standalone document sharing site it comes up a bit short.

Below: An embedded ThinkFree Docs viewer.

... Read more

If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of documents that have piled up over the years. People my age (recent college grads) are some of the worst, with nearly a decade of research papers, projects, and various snippets saved along the way--many of which took hours of hard work and are now relegated to a hard archive somewhere in your documents folder or on burnt optical media. Luckily for your files, there are a few places to share them with others who might be interested in reading.

Scribd is one of the most popular solutions, and my personal favorite of the bunch. It calls itself the "YouTube for documents," which is a fairly apt description. Scribd users can share popular document formats like Word, PDF, plain text, PowerPoint, and Excel. Each uploaded document can be made private or public, and is completely searchable. Users can also embed a document on Scribd on any Web site or blog. Users who like what they see can save the file as a PDF, Word file, text, or MP3 (spoken by an electronic voice).

What's really neat about Scribd is the built-in statistics tracking. This lets you keep track of when and where people have looked at your work, with some neat charts and a viewing log.

YouScript has been around for a couple of months now. YouScript gives your documents (mainly movie or TV scripts) a social networking spin, with the option to create writing groups to share your files with others online. Each group can schedule meetings, hand out assignments or homework, and discuss work in the integrated forums and comments. Unlike Scribd, however there's no built-in reader, and documents are managed in a PDF viewer.

OpenFloodgate is a document sharing service created by a Tina Seelig, executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. We heard about OpenFloodgate this morning and were pitched with the idea that it could be used to share documents for small companies using its document privacy features. Any uploaded document is displayed in an HTML viewer that converts each page into its own image. What's neat is OpenFloodgate's text size selector. This lets you pick from three sizes, including extralarge, which is about the size of a children's book. Also cool are user comments, which shows up as an overlay box on top of the document, not as a separate section.

I'd expect to see more of these sites popping up in the future, although with Google Docs, Thinkfree, and Zoho at work on online replacements for our office apps, we're likely to see file migration moving further and further away from the hard drive.

Several exhibitors at next week's Web 2.0 Expo are recreating the desktop workspace experience by using new Web technologies such as Ajax and Adobe Flex. This isn't a new idea, but what is interesting is how many of them have forgone creating their own tools and stuck to integrating existing Web services in a stylized portal platform.

Zcubes attempts to emulate a desktop workspace with nearly 30 different tools that mimic desktop applications. With most of the tools relegated to things like casual drawing, comic strips, and Web browsing, the emphasis of the suite is fun.

G.ho.st (Global Hosted Operating SysTem) calls itself a "virtual computer," which for the most part is true. The service borrows some style cues from Windows XP and has floating widgets like what you'd find on YourMinis. It uses Pandora as a music jukebox, and Meebo as an IM client. G.ho.st users also get 3 GB of free online storage, which can be used for saving things while away from a home PC.

Sparc integrates Thinkfree Office, 50 GB of online storage, instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and a DVD conversion tool. Sparc is a little different from the other two apps, as it requires a small, self-running Java download to get going. We're interested to see the pricing and partnerships with this one, as 50GB of Web storage isn't something that's being handed out for free these days.

See also: Peepel, YouOs, Xcerion.

Related: Web OS: coming to a desktop near you

The makers of ThinkFree, which gives away online alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, are planning to sell premium, Web-based software by the end of the first quarter of 2007. ThinkFree will charge between $5 and $10 per month for its premium online edition, letting you synchronize files saved to the Web with the work on your desktop. Does this mark the beginning of the end of the free ride for online software? Not really. ThinkFree's downloadable software will remain $50, while the current ThinkFree Online will become the Basic Edition and won't cost anything.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As other companies hawking online office software, such as Zoho, are building bridges to Microsoft Office 2007, ThinkFree seems to want its users to abandon Microsoft Office altogether in favor of its own suite. I wonder how well this strategy will work for ThinkFree. Its Java-based, online edition (left) has some great features, but it takes ages to open files. ThinkFree for the desktop is pretty good. It costs one-third of what the most basic edition of Office 2007 will cost, or one-eighth the fee for the beefier Microsoft Office Professional 2007.

However, if you paid ThinkFree up to $120 per year for the premium version that synchronizes files, then the total price of ThinkFree's desktop and online apps would surpass the $150 for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 by $20. Instead, you could just make a practice of uploading your office work--at no price--from your desktop software to ThinkFree, Zoho, or Google Docs online. Would you pay for a service to synchronize your online and hard drive documents automatically--or would you rather skimp and just upload and download by hand?

(Credit: Sharpcast)

On that note, building a bridge between the Web and your desktop seems like less work for a software company than reinventing an entire software suite. I'm still waiting to try Sharpcast's Project Hummingbird, which is due for beta testing early next year. This service is being built to let you synchronize all sorts of files--office work, photos, videos, and music. So far I like Sharpcast Photos, which lets you store pictures on its servers as well as on your desktop and handheld device. Edit a picture on your Windows Mobile 5 smart phone, for instance, and Sharpcast applies the changes everywhere else that image lives. Support for Macs rolled out to Sharpcast Photos this week, which offers a free trial until the end of January.