Thread: Online office suites

Online office suites have been around for quite a while, but for a long time they were looked at in wonderment, not because they did what they're supposed to do well, but because they could do them at all. Before proceedin.g further, let's define what exactly online office suites are. They're web based services that offer word processor, spreadsheet, presen tation and other applications, or rather online alternatives to desktop office suites such as MS Office or OpenOffice. Additionally, they're also required to leverage the cloud to bring to the user the added advantage of collaboration. With collaboration, it is possible for many users to work on a single document and not be restricted by geography. Another advantage of using online office suites is that all your documents reside in the cloud. They can be accessed from any PC with an internet connection and decent browser. And the best partl Most of them are free!

The top three contenders we've chosen were TliinkFree Office Online, Google Docs, and Zoho Office. Let's look at some of the similarities in the three contenders, first. Tliey're all free, work in a web browser and are cross platform. All three have communities associated with them wherein users create sample documents such as resumes or presentation templates, and share them with the community. Through this comparison, the question we're answering is not whether these office suites can give a blow to a heavy weight such as MS Office, but whether they're good as standalone solutions, and furthermore which is the overall solution of choice in terms of what is offered - productivity and collaboration.

Let's start with ThinkFree.com. The suite runs as a Java App and uses the JVM Uava Virtual Machine) environment. This is why it is different from the other two contenders. After a painfully long wait, the suite loads to reveal very rich productivity applications that almost mimic MS Office 2003. The word processor offers standard features such as spellcheck, word count, and even short cut keys. The Excel clone, offers all spreadsheet tools needed to sort elata. As for formula functions, there is full support. However, pivot tables were not offered. Since, the presentation tool is made to look exactly like the 2003 PowerPoint version, you even get to insert slide transitions and custom animation using a very familiar interface Putting all this together, ThinkFree scores high in terms of familiarity. However, the productivity tools are heavy on system resources. As a result, you'll find the response on slower systems or connections to be lagging, compared to another option such as Google Docs. Loading time goes against this otherwise very powerful office suite.