Office tools online

Over the Christmas break I spent a massive amount of time researching and investigating the latest online office tools and spreadsheets in order to put a number of projects / documents that we use into a shared environment from where several team members can work on them at the same time. Knowing full well that Office 2007 is about to hit the market (bringing with it similar capabilities albeit shared on a server instead of the wider web) I wanted to get a grip on what was out there in order to understand how the new Office technologies will compare.

Since the emergence of Ajax technology - a tool that allows web pages to become more interactive with virtually live changes taking place that are displayed almost instantly - a number of online tools have hit the market promising a new era of online working for companies and indiviudals.

This presents a number of advantages when compared to normal document creation including i) an excellent way of saving memory ii) constant updates and back-ups and iii) the afore-mentioned ability to collaborate with colleagues and friends online.

I managed to whittle a long list down to two main contenders to the throne: Google (shock!) and Zoho.

The first I looked at was Zoho - a very powerful tool with all of the functionality I was looking for. In fact, its innovative and simple Creator system and CRM package appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. Then I started using it. After about 5-6 hours of having built the online application that I wanted I simply gave up on the system - the reason = SPEED. It was soooooo sloooowwww. Having looked on numerous forums I was hoping to find an explanation of why this might be? One forum suggested that this might be due to the IE6 browser I was using? So I tried Firefox - but alas, it was just as slow. I also found that the page would slow down so much that the page would eventually lock itself. So reluctantly, I moved on…

Next up was Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets application which combines Writely and Google Spreadsheets together to form one simple yet powerful interface. The simplicity of this application was matched by its speed in which it easily outperformed everything else in the market. For application power, it didn’t match Zoho’s functionality, although I have little doubt that it will before long. On the off chance that those clever people at Google don’t manage to replicate these, they can always buy Zoho and add it to their own portfolio.

It’s clear that the long term struggle is shaping up to be Microsoft v Google on this front. If that is the case, Google’s model of free tools will clearly have a competitive advantage. After all, who wants to pay for something that you can get for free?