The Office 2.0 Bug Tracker created more than a year ago is not evolving much these days, and there is a very simple reason for that: most of the bugs that have been identified early on, such as the lack of a proper infrastructure for single sign-on across applications, or the inability to copy-and-paste data from one to another, have yet to be fixed. Nevertheless, some dedicated folks are working hard to fix them, and among them my friends Eric Hoffert and Tom Snyder, founders of ShareMethods and iNetOffice respectively. Together with other Office 2.0 companies, they have created the OpenSAM consortium, which aims at developing the standards that will fix these bugs once and for all. What follows is an article contributed by Eric.

OpenSAM (Open Simple AJAX Mashup) is an open ecosystem of online office applications created by EditGrid, iNetOffice, Preezo, and ShareMethods. This consortium of software-as-a-service (SaaS) application vendors is developing a set of AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming recommendations that allow multiple online applications to interoperate. OpenSAM enables the Internet as a platform for “plug and play” office productivity suites tailored for specific business needs. OpenSAM was initially announced and demonstrated via a multi-way mash-up and proof-of-concept at the first Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, CA in October 2006. Commercial availability was unveiled at the Software 2007 Conference in San Jose, CA in May 2007.

Leading online application vendors Caspio, EchoSign, EditGrid, iNetOffice, Joyent, Persony, Preezo, ShareMethods, and Sheetster are initial members of OpenSAM. The companies are working together to support OpenSAM so that systems integrators and end users can create their own online suites of integrated applications to improve productivity, better serve customers and users, solve business problems rapidly, and avoid vendor lock-in.

OpenSAM was created to address a set of user and application provider limitations for Office 2.0 services including but not limited to the fact that: (1) users log into each Office 2.0 application separately; (2) users download and upload documents to and from each Office 2.0 application separately; and (3) users are unable to copy and paste content across Office 2.0 applications, or if they can do so, there is often a loss of fidelity and appearance. These limitations inhibit a more widespread use and utility of Office 2.0 applications. And so OpenSAM combines open standards and techniques respectively for single sign-on, document sharing, and cut & paste to solve these important end-user and application provider challenges. The OpenSAM recommendations make use of proven standards, are easy to adopt, and support some of the most important user scenarios.

To create a suite of OpenSAM-based applications, a user selects a home application that includes a repository for file storage such as ShareMethods, a document-management application. The user can then select any other productivity applications such as iNetWord from iNetOffice for word processing, EditGrid for spreadsheets, Preezo for presentations, and other applications as needed. Productivity applications can be launched from home applications, and may be replaced, upgraded, or added at any time. Documents are stored in common file formats, so there is no concern about proprietary data formats in the event that a user wants to switch applications. OpenSAM is targeting the Internet as a platform for an application ecosystem that any vendor can join where users can create and modify their own customized application suites, with no vendor lock-in; gone are the days of single-vendor monolithic application suites that try to be all things to all people…

OpenSAM benefits from an innovation called the “Internet File System”, or IFS, which enables an open-standards document repository where multiple applications can read or write documents to a common location, even if each application was developed independently by different vendors. This type of “building block” approach is completely new for the online office space, and provides significant flexibility to interconnect services from different companies into a single end-user solution.

An example of OpenSAM at work is ShareOffice, the first commercially available online office based on open standards that was launched in May 2007. ShareOffice combines an online office based on open standards with enterprise document management on-demand bringing major product categories together into an Office 2.0 application for the first time. With ShareOffice, sales teams can easily create, edit, and share documents and spreadsheets online, and can automatically generate common sales documents such as proposals, contracts, quotes, and letters in a single browser interface using customer data from Salesforce.com. Marketers are likewise able to easily and quickly create, manage, and share marketing documents online, such as newsletters, news releases, and product brochures.

Membership in OpenSAM is open to any SaaS vendor that wants to participate by making its applications able to integrate and share data using the OpenSAM recommendations. OpenSAM based applications can run within stand-alone integrated suites, or within Salesforce.com’s AppExchange ecosystem of online applications integrated with Salesforce.com. OpenSAM applications can all write to the same user-defined storage repository for easy file management. OpenSAM invites any SaaS application vendor to participate in creating an open ecosystem of online applications that gives users the power to create and modify their own solutions, and gives vendors of any size a wider audience and broader application potential for their solutions. For more information, visit www.opensam.org.

The Office 2.0 Conference 2007 will have a special focus on OpenSAM, including a plenary session, detailed breakout sessions, live demonstrations from multiple OpenSAM members EditGrid, iNetOffice, Preezo, and ShareMethods, and more…

This article was contributed by Eric Hoffert, CEO of ShareMethods.