Office 2.0 Milestone 1
Thursday, March 2nd 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
With the release of Thumbstacks, an online alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint, Office 2.0 reached Milestone 1: all major components of a standard office productivity suite are now available as online services.
Thumbstacks is exactly what I wished for in this past article. With the ability for a presenter to invite participants and remotely control the flow of slides, here is a free alternative to expensive services such as WebEx. It won’t allow you to share a screen, but if all you want is to publish or broadcast a simple presentation with limited graphics and no animations — which no presenter should use anyway in my humble opinion, Thumbstacks does the job without requiring participants to install any kind of plugin on their web browsers. The presentation builder is effective, even though I would love to get support for hyperlinks and the much-beloved Trebuchet MS font that seems to be a staple for any Web 2.0 application. I built this simple presentation as a proof concept.
Our next Milestone for Office 2.0 will be to get at least two service providers such as Google or Zoho to offer complete office productivity suites with single sign on and consistent document management interfaces for sharing and publishing. Having at least two alternatives available will significantly reduce risk for anyone making a transition from Office 1.0 to Office 2.0 model, while competition will ensure a steady pace for the addition of new features. In the meantime, Thumbstacks made it into my Office 2.0 setup.
Many thanks to Assaf and Tim for pointing me to Thumbstacks.
UPDATE 6/22/2006: Zoho is complete now.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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[…] The folks at IT|Redux were kind enough to link to us, and mentioned in passing that they’d like to see the well-known Trebuchet MS font included. In general, we include fonts that we know are well represented, either directly or with a good alternative, on most platforms. […]
[…] Another area that is hotting up like the calendars is the online office space. That is applications that allow online editing and saving of documents. These range from standard word processors up to spreadsheet applications and online slideshow tools. Systems like these are all set to become the next generation of office tools. The next Microsoft Office. As I write Microsoft are preparing their take on the scene. I am not sure of the exact name but I am sure it will have Live in somewhere, definately a beta, maybe a Windows too. Rumours are rife that Google is preparing a suite to compete with all of these services, and the recent acquiring of Writely only serves as evidence for this case. At this point it is key to note that the race is still on. No one has made a full office system that works totally via your browser all locked up under a single login. I know a blog that is devoted to this one aim, where a recent victory was celebrated when for the first time every office service became available online. The next step is getting it all with a consistent layout and interface, with one logon, from one company. As you’d expect Google and Microsoft are the big names that are up for this. But there are smaller new companies that have started to offer office services. Some just offer one or two, but Zoho is going full out to cover everything. And whilst Google and Microsoft are preparing theirs, Zoho has some services online now. So you can go and word process online right now with ZohoWriter or plan events with ZohoPlanner or (coming really soon) calculate things, and organise data with ZohoSheet. […]
Zoho does have a presentation tool now, you may want to update this.
Kingsley,
Indeed, I wrote about it there. Post updated. Thanks for the notice.
There is an presentation tool that focuses on rich media intergration that is online at http://www.empressr.com
[…] Author’s note [March 3, 2006]: A good office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint is now available. It’s called Thumbstacks and was featured in this article. Many thanks to Assaf and Tim for pointing me to this great application. […]
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