Non-partisan software developer

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Web 2.0 Office -- getting there

Reading more about Web Office Applications and how they are starting to become more viable. There are definately some cool applications that exist right now.

My favorite of the bunch right now has to be Zimbra...



their idea of pluggable "Zimlets" is very powerful. Arbitray bits of data become hot (clickable) and integrated with 3rd party services like VoIP, maps, shipping and shopping services... Some examples are Skype click-2-call support by clicking on phone numbers that become hot inside the AJAX client, Yahoo! Maps simply appear when you mouse over an address.

The reason I think Zimbra has something here is they are integrating with services that are best on the web (think google maps, online shopping, shipping tracking, wikipedia, etc...) these are all services that don't make much sense on the desktop because they require too much data / collaboration etc...

Then I found this quote on Ajaxian....

"What I really want from Ajax apps is for them to do stuff that it’s too hard to do with binary apps. I want them to be sensibly integrated with online resources; I want them to support realtime collaboration. I want them to do different stuff from Word/Excel/Powerpoint, not just do the same thing with a different engine under the hood.

We need to find our way with Ajax applications. Let’s not just port over to the web way, with a poorer version due to the limitations. Rather we need to embrace the differences and do as Paul says. Do things that suit the web better."

This got me to thinking about presentation software. It really works okay on the desktop but usually you want to show your presentations to people all over the place. So now we have a bunch of services that allow us to share our desktop and applications like GotoMeeting etc... This seems like a perfect Web 2.0 application (presentation for the web) but not much has been done with presentation software yet. I found a couple: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ and Gliffy.com which isn't really Powerpoint like but more like Visio. There has to be more presentation software that is web based. I'd really like to know what else is available.

1 comment:

audiomojo said...

Dude. That was awesome!!!!!