The First Office 2.0 Suites
Wednesday, April 19th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
Thanks to the recent coverage we got on LifeHacker and the help of more than two dozen contributors listed as a comment to this post, the Office 2.0 Database now has 90 entries organized in 28 categories. I recently updated the Dabble DB view I am using for the database and organized entries into families, which makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for. But an other view simply sorted by application names shows something quite interesting: the emergence of the very first Office 2.0 suites.
Five vendors have three or more applications currently listed on the database: 37signals, AdventNet (the Zoho Folks), ajax13, Google, and Yahoo!. AdventNet and Google come out first with six applications each. All five but Yahoo! have a word processor, two have a spreadsheet editor, and all of them sport rather consistent user interfaces across their portfolio of applications. What this tells me is that complete suites of Office 2.0 applications should emerge by the end of the year. But before we declare any winner, let’s define what an Office 2.0 suite should be to really qualify:
First, it should include a minimal set of components:
- Email Client
- Word Processor
- Spreadsheet Editor
- Presentation Editor
- Database
Second, it should have the following attributes:
- Consistent user interface
- Single sign-on
- Copy/Paste or Import/Export between components
So far, none of the five vendors listed above match these criteria, but I would be willing to bet that a first one will before the end of the quarter, and at least two more before the end of the year. I would also expect Microsoft and Zimbra to join the group within that timeframe. Now let’s step back for a minute: this whole Office 2.0 thing started on January 1st of 2006, with an inference post that coined the term for the first time. Less than four months later, 90 Office 2.0 applications are available and six to seven vendors are busy building complete Office 2.0 suites. Is that fast or what?
Last but not least, the good folks at Dabble DB have been working around the clock to fix the feed entry into the Office 2.0 bug tracker. I originally requested an XML feed for the content one can store into the database, but Andrew and Avi where quick to point out that a JSON feed might be easier to use from straight HTML pages. They just added support for it on a limited basis and I will try to use it in order to provide custom views for the Office 2.0 database. Stay tuned…
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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The following people have contributed to the Office 2.0 Database:
Raphael Bauduin, Suzan Bird, Carl Bremmer, Matthias Breuer, James Brewis, Aaron Curtis, Eric Goldstein, Etienne Gonnaud, Michael Grubb, Christoph Helzle, Menachem Hoffman, Onur Kose, David Lanier, David Lee, Jason Lemkin, Ivaylo Lenkov, Rob Mayhew, Arvind Natarajan, Robert Nyman, Kat Ortland, Brent Parker, Mahalie Pech, Lee Provoost, John Robb, Toby Segaran, Ramesh Sripathy, Geoffrey Tang, Maggie Tsai, Anthony Webb, and Danny Wen.
Special thanks to Lee Provoost for his outstanding contribution of 19 entries.
Let’s twozero…
The so called Web 2.0, Internet’s millennium and the all new revolution, not only brought us applications like Flickr, Gmail and of course a little bit of web standard popularity — which is good by the way. The next generation…
What I am wondering is whether the future of Office 2.0 will be these web-based OS systems or not? The thing that blocks adoption a bit is that currently you need to log into a dozen of applications from different vendors. While there are people working on single sign on, I still think that we need something like one web page where we can launch all our stuff, with the necessary authentication, security, etc. Do we need such a web based OS for that or can we achieve this in orther ways?
Lee is raising an important point. The issue is not only in the login authentication and security, although those are definitely the first barrier. We will also need to figure out a good way to exchange data betweeen applications. Cut and paste through the desktop will not work — if there is a lot of data, and the user is on a standard 1-2Mbit connection (or, God forbid, on a slower link), the experience will be miserable.
Lee, at 3TERA we are working in this direction — I will appreciate the opportunity to discuss these issues with you in more detail. Ismael has my contact info, or just email to info at 3tera dot com…
Ismael,
I’m quite confused by Zoho virtual office. Unlike the standalone Zoho applications, this one seems to be a dowloadable package that you need to install on your own servers — which makes sense for some SMB’s, but for the majority a hosted version would be better. Have you looked at it yet? Am I just missing something? It would be so illogical for these guys not to have a hosted one.
Nice that you brought this up, Zoli. We are indeed working on a hosted version of Zoho Virtual Office which should be available soon.
Zoli,
You are correct, the majority of users would prefer a hosted version of Zoho Virtual Office. But at the same time there are many organizations, usually SMBs, that want to have a downloadable version which they can install on their servers.
For this the reason, we planned to have both a downloadable version and a hosted version of Zoho Virtual Office. The hosted version of Zoho Virtual Office is in the testing phase and will be available for the users to access very soon.
Ever since I experienced a hard drive crash, I have been slowly moving away from my “desktop PC” to an Internet one. The major problem has been the multitude of applications though. I’ve been exploring 3 “solutions” for having everything together.
1) A custom module for my Google homepage that builds a quick launch bar. I’ve been slowly adding in the entries from the Office 2.0 Database there, giving any user complete control over which applications get loaded.
2) eyeOS. This is something I came across recently, but it’s still in the early stages. I’ve not tried to build any interfaces (eyeApps) yet, but when I get some time I will give it a go and see how loading some Office 2.0 applications works out.
3) Basically a custom loader which offers single sign-on for all my applications. Most have the ability to do auto logins, so that seems to be working, but I have concerns about security. The same goes for using various APIs to build the interfaces between the applications. It would be nice if other developers beat me to this though — I do not have so much time these days.
It’s an exciting time these days with these new advances, and I look forward to the great blog posts here and the continued growth of the Office 2.0 Database — keep up the great work!
BTW, for anyone attending the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando on May 16-18th, SAP is holding a Scripting Langauges Breakfeast the morning of the 16th in the conference center — so stop by!
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