Working Offline
Tuesday, July 4th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
As anyone knows by now, Office 2.0 makes it a little bit difficult to work offline, which is one of the major objections to the concept. So the trick is in trying to stay connected most of the time, aiming for high connectivity. But when nothing will do, some alternatives have to be devised.
When being offline, especially during long flights, two main activities can be accomplished without breaking the rules for Office 2.0: reading existing documents and writing drafts for documents to be published at a later time.
For reading an existing document, I save it on a thumb drive (more on this here) and I send a copy to myself via email. Doing so, I can read the document from my laptop or from my Cingular 8125 smartphone, even when it’s disconnected from the network. I find this type of workflow especially useful for hotel reservations and driving directions. Having them stored on the smartphone removes the need for connecting to the Internet, logging into Salesforce.com — or whatever CMS you’re using, and retrieving the reservations just after landing to my destination.
Regarding such reservations, I always save them as PDF documents, either from the confirmation web page or from the email receipt. Doing this ensures that I can read them from any device, online or offline, and without losing any graphics. I also use naming conventions such as 20060703-SFO-to-LHR.pdf or 20060703-Sheraton.pdf to make it easier to find what I’m looking for.
For writing drafts of documents to be published when I’m back online — blog posts usually, I like to use a simple email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird and send drafts to myself. I configure the email client to support HTML editing and to only send emails. That way, I ensure that my emails do not get out of my Gmail account when they do not have to.
For offline blogging, I considered using WordPress’ Blog by Email feature, but it does not support categories or moderation. I also took a look at Postie, but it does not support post excerpts, which I am using for all posts on this blog. And beside, publishing a blog post is not the difficult part; writing it is, and for this, a simple email client does the job as well as anything else I could think of.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Ismael,
I use a SmartDisk Firefly ultraportable 20GB hard drive — believe me, it’s small — packed with portable apps like OpenOffice.org. I also use a Linux VM (can’t remember the source right now, but I’ll look for it). This way I have a very portable offline alternative. I guess you can also use a SanDisk Cruzer mini drive for the same purpose, depending on how many files you need to carry with you. I have mixed feelings about U3, since it seems to me one can get all that’s needed on the Internet without paying the seemingly higher price for a U3 drive.
-Ryan
Ecto will allow you to work and save offline.
Ecto?
Currently at my work we have an online Project Manager/CRM, which is great until I have no Internet access, such as on an airplane, train, or some clients. I have overcome this by developing a simple Java desktop application that downloads all projects I am currently working on. But this still require me to have a laptop or desktop.
Ecto is a blog application for Mac OS X. w.bloggar is a Windows one.
U3 smart flash drives are not generally higher priced (at least in the US), and are sometimes even cheaper than non-U3 drives. I’ve been told that this isn’t the case in other countries, so I can’t comment on that.
-Elly
Offline storage has been in the skunkworks of the next generation Web for quite some time now.
The most well-known of these is the Mozilla Storage project that is due with Firefox 2.0, now available as Beta to replace the current storage system of the browser, but enables SQLite for other purposes as well.
The ones who do not have such an intimate relationship with Firefox may use a nifty workaround using Flash called AMASS and visit Brad Neuberg’s blog or Julien Couvreur’s ideas.
Also Dan Bricklin with his WikiCalc has implemented the concept of offline editing quite nicely in his web-based spreadsheet app.
Add to it Morfik that has a built-in embedded database (Firebird, the ex-Interbase) on the client side and you have a pretty good choice of technologies to start from.
[…] So where are we? Performance issues, overload of patches, need to become one’s IT support: these are all signs of a failed model: installing and updating software on the desktop. Businesses are increasingly recognizing this and are turning to SaaS, and I feel we’ve reached the threshold where it will become more and more attractive for individual users, too. I’m not a religious SaaS believer though. It’s nice to see even the absolute Office 2.0 proponents to have come around and realize the importance of offline access. Seamless computing for a while will require online/offline access. […]
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