Free Hosted Office Apps in the Wonderful World of Web 2.0 Popular Web Office Applications and Services Vangie Beal
You've no doubt heard a lot recently about Google's hosted applications, which has lead to speculation that a complete Web-office suite from Google is on the horizon. Right now, Google offers, for free, Calendar, Gmail (Webmail with Google Talk integration), Page Creator, Spreadsheets (read Google Sprerads it On). Google's offerings currently don't make up a suite, but the mix of available applications does lend weight to making a free Web-based Google Office a reality in the near future.
Writely is one of several Web-based word processing services that use Ajax to enable users to create, store share and edit documents online. In March, Google acquired Writely and opened it up to beta testing last month. The online word processor allows you to create new documents or open Microsoft Word documents, as well as other formats such as OpenOffice, HTML or text files. Writely offers an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor to format and spell-check documents. Like many of Google's apps, Writely let users — up to 50 at one time, according to the Web site — share and collaborate on word processing documents online.
Earlier this month at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Google officially launched both Writely and the Spreadsheets application as Google Docs & Spreadsheets services
(read Google Docs: Spreadsheets, Writely on the Web ). For now, both Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets can be evaluated for free by anyone with a Google account.
Google Docs lets you create new files or open Microsoft Word documents as well as other formats such as OpenOffice, HTML or text files.
To make collaboration a bit easier, you can access a revision history and even roll-back to any version of the document at any time. Once you have created or edited a document, you can then download it to your computer as a Word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, HTML or even ZIP file. You can also post your Google Docs documents directly to blogs, such as Blogger and RSS feeds as well.
Google also offers additional application services as a package available under the name Google Apps for Your Domain. This desktop application suite includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk and Page Creator. The free hosted Google Apps allow you to create free e-mail accounts using your own domain name, allowing you to continue your own branding while using e-mail and saving on an e-mail server and storage, since all the content is hosted on Google's servers. Later this year Google is expected to offer a premium version of Google Apps for the enterprise that will carry a fee and be fully supported.
Other companies offering Web-based office services include Silver Office Inc.'s Silveroffice service, called gOffice, and ThinkFree. While gOffice isn't free, Silveroffice charges only a nominal 99 cent per month fee, which includes storage space for up to 10,000 documents. gOffice also has a large selection of free text, which you can use for document templates, as well as several stationery templates to use as backgrounds. You can also choose to upload your own corporate letterhead. gOffice is best-suited for writing letters, presentations, memos, and simple reports. Documents created in gOffice can also be exported in PDF format.
ThinkFree offers a more complete Web-based office suite that allows you to access, create, and edit Microsoft Office files (including Word, Excel or PowerPoint). ThinkFree's free online suite consists of Office Write for word processing, Office Calc for spreadsheets and a presentation application called ThinkFree Office Show.
ThinkFree offers integration with Web 2.0 services such as Flickr.
ThinkFree also offers mash-ups that provide integration with other Web 2.0 services such as Flickr and del.icio.us. In terms of collaboration, ThinkFree allows you to share your folders where others can post files for you to review, and the application gives you the control to set read-only or read-and-edit privilege access for each person. While the free online office suite offers 1 GB of Web storage, you can upgrade the storage, for a fee.
ThinkFree has also announced plans to offer later this year a premium subscription service that will add administrative tools and more functionality.
