Office 2.0 Directory
Tuesday, March 28th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
My little experiment with Office 2.0 received some nice coverage from Mark Hall at Computerworld yesterday. I am now using about twenty Office 2.0 applications on a daily basis, and I have reviewed more than sixty over the past three months. Time has come to build a proper directory for them. This will allow me to track features and bugs, while offering handy comparisons between applications. Last week-end, I did a review of Office 2.0 alternatives to Microsoft Access that could help me build such as thing. Here is what I came up with.
I initially started with Zoho Creator, which I had reviewed in the past. I then discovered Lazybase, following a very nice email from its creator, Toby Segaran. But I finally opted for Dabble DB, trusting the advice of my friend Pascal, and having read the excellent review from Brian Benzinger. Going straight to the point, Dabble DB is the most amazing Office 2.0 application that I have ever seen.
I won’t go into too many details, for Brian’s review does a much better job than I could, but all I can say is that everything that I like about Office 2.0 is there: superb user interface making a smart use of AJAX, sharing, publication, syndication, data import/export, custom subdomains, you name it! Because the application goes beyond the traditional relational model, some terminology might be confusing at first. For example, tables are called categories, and are not really tables to begin with. Nevertheless, the user interface is so clean and intuitive that such challenges are quickly overcome. Overall, the Dabble DB folks have done an amazing job, and the way they’ve put everything together should serve as a reference for any Office 2.0 application moving forward. Note to Salesforce.com: take a serious look at this.
Armed with such a great tool, I defined a couple of categories, recorded most Office 2.0 applications I know, and organized them into 21 families. I then published the two, with two simple clicks of the mouse. This gives you access to the first version of the Office 2.0 Directory and to my new Office 2.0 Setup, soon to replace the original version. I also created an additional view, which allows me to publish the entire Office 2.0 Database and corresponding RSS feed. CSV, OPML, PDF and Text versions are also available. And if I had added any dates to my data schema, an ICAL version would be available as well.
At this point, I can only think of one thing that is really missing: the ability to publish a form that would allow any user to create new entries, without having access to any other data, much like jotForm and Wufoo do it. I hope that such a feature will be added in the future, and in the meantime I created a simple Office 2.0 Directory Entry form with Wufoo that will allow anyone to submit new applications to the database. Awesome!
Regarding the Office 2.0 Directory itself, I have added links to articles from Solution Watch (Brian Benzinger) and TechCrunch (Michael Arrington), for they have the most thorough reviews of Office 2.0 applications and Web 2.0 services out there. I also defined a set of attributes that a good Office 2.0 application should have. The database is not fully populated yet, and I encourage you to contribute some data by using the Office 2.0 Directory Entry form. Thanks!
Last but not least, Roger Jennings wrote a great review of Office 2.0 databases.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hi Ismael,
Great post! Thanks in particular for taking the time to publish your Office 2.0 Directory. I tried to trackback, but FYI, the “Trackback to this post” link does not work — it generates an error.
Cheers
Patrick,
Thanks for the kind feedback. I will look into the problem you’re describing, in the meantime, all you have to do is copy and paste the trackback URL, which is the same as the one used for the ‘Trackback this post’ link.
Thanks Ismael, Dabble looks very, very exciting. I see that Quickbase is listed in the database you created, so the obvious question is how did you like it compared to Quickbase? I can see from the screenshots that the UI appears to be much better, but how about otherwise?
David,
Dabble DB is not yet as sophisticated, but the user interface is much better.
Online Flight Log…
I have been using the Dabble DB online database for a couple of weeks and liked it so much that I decided to migrate my flight log to it. It’s now available online and I can update it from any computer with an Internet connection. I also added a…
[…] Office 2.0 will become a reality: Hit Within less than nine months, the Office 2.0 Database, announced on this post, grew from nothing to over 330 applications. The concept introduced exactly a year ago got its first conference, with over 450 participants, 105 speakers, and 56 sponsors. Zoho emerged as a likely winner in the space, and ThinkFree demonstrated that web browsers are now powerful enough to support most of the features that are offered by traditional Office 1.0 productivity suites today [Disclaimer: I serve as an advisor for both companies]. Google’s release of Google Docs on the first day of the Office 2.0 Conference also gave a clear signal that things are getting serious now, and that past involvements with OpenOffice.org were just smoke and mirrors. Next year, it will be interesting to see wether Microsoft finally releases something of substance under the Office Live brand, and who gets their hands on ThinkFree. The later would be a perfect acquisition for Google, but in the meantime an OEM deal with Intuit or Salesforce.com would make a lot of sense as well. Investors might also be interested to know that the company is giving serious thoughts to the idea of raising a small round of venture funding… […]
“At this point, I can only think of one thing that is really missing: the ability to publish a form that would allow any user to create new entries, without having access to any other data, much like jotForm and Wufoo do it. I hope that such a feature will be added in the future, and in the meantime I created a simple Office 2.0 Directory Entry form with Wufoo that will allow anyone to submit new applications to the database. Awesome!”
Nenest does exactly this.
[…] The Office 2.0 Database created almost a year ago now contains over 450 applications, which have been submitted by more than 150 contributors. It started as a single page separate from the core IT|Redux blog, then evolved into a collection of pages, but did not offer the ability for readers to write reviews. This is now fixed, with the release of a brand new Office 2.0 Database, with its own domain name. […]
[…] The Office 2.0 Database was created in March of last year, and references over 650 applications today. This means that we have been adding an average of about 1.4 applications every day. With such a deluge of options, identifying the most promising applications is becoming quite a challenge, and we need a better way for vendors to pitch their wares. Here comes vator.tv, an online pitching service recently created by a friend of mine. Vator.tv lets you upload your video pitch for an idea — any idea — and join competitions that receive the participation of industry analysts, press people, and venture capitalists. In a nutshell, it’s YouTube for pitches. [Continue…] […]
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed
Leave a Comment