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What are the options for moving office applications to the Internet?

Posted in Technology, Internet on July 31, 2008 at 1:59 pm

Currently, we are investigating the available options for hosting office applications on the Internet, so I read with interest the post “Google Vs. Microsoft - Office Politics” by Moshe Zeidman as this is the first time we have ever looked in a direction other than Microsoft for our office applications. I have written about some of these issues before in “Who should we rely on for our business applications: Google or Microsoft?“, Starting out with Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live Workspace BETA and this is clearly a topic that is creeping higher and higher up our information technology agenda.

www.jasonslater.co.uk We started out a long time ago with the obligatory website, then the bespoke Intranet built on FrontPage and ASP, then moved towards SharePoint, and now we are looking at Microsoft Office Live Workspace and also … Google Apps as a potential future platform for our office applications. SharePoint is a great platform yet it has never really gained the momentum within our business that it needs to really make a big difference to the everyday work ethos. This is probably due to the complexity in setting up, configuring and maintaining the backend applications. Internet based platforms, however, seem to have a much easier time breaking through into the hearts and minds of users and administrators alike. The difficulty will be when it’s time to choose which big button to push that finally connects the user base into the online application world; will it be Google, Microsoft, or something else?

The big two platforms we have seen so far are still in their infancy and in a number of areas it clearly shows (no online file backup, disjointed integration, first generation UI, and limited back-end integration) however the potential benefits of online collaboration and data sharing are way too tempting to ignore. From what we have experienced so far clearly a combination of services from both camps would offer the best fit for us - that is the integrated nature into the desktop applications of Outlook,Excel, Word and PowerPoint coupled with the flexibility and broad appeal of the Google applications. If we could also fit in the fine grained administrative control built into SharePoint together with its extensibility then we have a real platform for hosting our office applications online.