Microsoft and Online Office Update

We’ve had prior posts on the topic of Microsoft and Online Office, here, here, here  and here. There’s a great current recap of the Microsoft and Online Office conundrum over at Read/Write Web. It’s a nice SWOT analysis of Microsoft’s strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It ends with a list of options for Microsoft which I’ve placed into this handy Zoho poll. What do you think?

 (I couldn’t get the poll to show up in line here on WordPress, if you have any tips on that please let me know.)

New Zoho Notebook Launched

In case you haven’t already heard, Zoho launched the new Notebook. I’m impressed with the feature set, surprised really at the quantity and depth of the feature set.

I still believe that Zoho is missing out on an opportunity to gain SMB customers by:

- Package thier products in a way that could make it a compelling office suite. I know there is Zoho Virtual Office but the elements of the Office are not readily understood, do I get Notebook with that? Can I add on Notebook? Do I get Project?

- Provide examples of how each product can help growing businesses. How can a Wiki help my business and how is that different than Notebook?

- Providing a downloadable toolbar by which to access all the Zoho products.

Overall the product set is impressive, the company is responsive to customer feedback and they deliver products at a pace I’ve never seen before.

Online Office Suite Review and Comparison

Computerworld has a recent review of online office suites, Ajax13, Google, Thinkfree and Zoho. It’s a good article. If your considering using an online office suite for your business it’s worth a read.

For those of you who are watching the online office suite marketplace, it also notes that Google and ThinkFree may be in negotiations. Do you think it will happen?

Web-Based Project Management Tools Experience

We did a little searching around today for web-based project management. The first results in Google were sponsored links for TeamWorkZone.com, eProject.com and AutoTask.com. These might be great tools but I didn’t spend any time looking at them because I couldn’t find any pricing on the web sites and no demo was available without filling out a form. So I couldn’t tell if they had such great tools I would be willing to be contacted by someone to give me a demo. That and the combination that there was no pricing led me to believe they would be expensive.

So I went back to the core. I signed up for a free trial of BaseCamp and Zoho Project. Basecamp was eliminated because I couldn’t put dates on the To-Do items. I know you can put them on Milestones but not everything that needs to be done in a week is a ‘milestone’.

Now Zoho compared to Central Desktop. Zoho has a more visually appearing interface. We also liked the reports. The pricing is good. The thing that kept us from converting today? The inability to add comments to a task. There’s no way for staff or update or reassign a task and add a comment related to the change. This is possible in Central Desktop. Also like the way task lists are available via links on the left navigation in Central Desktop. It would be nice to be able to see this in Zoho.

One thing that definately needs to be fixed in Central Desktop is that if you have a long list of task and you scroll down the page and edit one, the date selection overlay appears at the top of the page, not where you are on the page. Apart from that, I think I owe Central Desktop an apology. The product actually includes a well rounded set of elements for task management. However, I would switch to Zoho if I could add comments to tasks. Primarily for the reports and the way milestones can have a date range, it’s very helpful for building a tactics gantt chart rather than just a task gantt chart.

 So there you have it, focus group of one.

Replace Microsoft Outlook?

Offline access is an active topic for web-based products today. I’m curious what all of you think about how to handle offline email. This has some up in a couple of conversations over last few days and Scalix had an interesting post closely related to the topic yesterday. Say you provide web-based email, BlueTie, Zoho, Load.com, Webmail.us. Many say that people would like very much to have a good Outlook alternative but do you think that companies like those mentioned should focus on high quality, very effective integration with Outlook for offline support or look to develop thier own offline client (which may still work within a browser but offline)?  We’ve got a great community of industry insiders and enthusiasts here at SaaS-a-fras, it would be great to exchange (pun intended) thoughts on this topic.

Open-Source vs. SAAS

An interesting post by Mark Suster at Koral doing a little bit of a compare/contrast of Open-Source vs. SAAS. I found it interesting since some companies are SAAS (BlueTie, Zoho) and others are Open-Source (Zimbra, Scalix). 

I wonder if it doesn’t come down to the level of technical sophistication that will make one or the other more attactive to an enterprise. For example, would a small business owner of say an office of 5 to 10 people ever think about getting something they have to install or configure on a server like Zimbra for example? Surely they would go with something more ‘turn-key’ like BlueTie for email and calendar and ThinkFree or Zoho for documents.

So maybe it comes down to enterprise size, open-source for larger enterprises that have their own IT staff and SAAS for smaller enterprises or those larger enterprises that are trying to save IT staff costs.

It would be good to include a classificiation of target company size in that product chart I mentioned before.

Web-Based Apps vs. Microsoft

There was a very good article summarizing the Web-Based Apps vs. Microsoft discussion by Cynthia Harvey over at Datamation entitled: Free Web-Based Office Productivity Apps. The sub heads within the article pretty much sum up the discussion to date:

Let’s Share

Wherever You Go, There It Is

Whose Server Do You Trust?

Free!

Show Me The Features

Just A Bit Quirky

Will The Empire Strike Back?

Again, a very good summary. I think it will be great to do a summary of progress in each of these areas say in 6 months and then again in a year to see what changes have occured and progress made.

Slowing Down for the Holiday

Well we’ve reached the bottom of the PR trough with the holiday coming next week. The blogs are slowing down, the only press releases that come out will be the ones they don’t want you to read. Alternatively, who will want to make the first splash of the new year? Who will have the first press release of the year? Zimbra, Zoho, Foldera? I’ll provide what link bait I can for whomever’s first. Just don’t tell Google, otherwise I might have to add a ‘NoFollow’ tag….

 Here are a few other things I’d like to see in 07:

A comprehensive chart of who offers what in terms of applications for business; email, ’word’ documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint, project planning, etc. Any volunteers? You should be able to get a lot of links for something thorough. 

Will storage size stop being used as a product differentiator in 2007? Can someone please do a survey for us and let us know if customers really see this as a key factor?

How many new products will Zoho launch in 07? Raju or Arvind, is there a Zoho Mail coming?

Do those ratios in Nichebot really work? (Keyword campaign in progress.)

Foldera Launch….. Still skeptical Oliver & Dave…. you can send my beta login to catchyaintit [at] yahoo.com  

Who will have a mash up for Goowy first?

Which conference, related to our topics here, is THE one to go to for 2007?

Will the expanded features of products like Zimbra, HyperOffice and others begin to make a serious dent into the Hosted Exchange market? 

What do you think will be interesting with everyone in 2007, basecamp, bluetie, everyone.net, foldera, fusemail, hyperoffice, intermedia.net, load.com, mailsnare, mailstreet, MI8, myoffice.net, norada, runbox, scalix, sherweb, simplicato, solodox, swishmail, thinkfree, usa.net, webmail.us, zimbra, zoho…

What else needs to be covered?

Our visitor stats are growing pretty strong so please help tell your story, provide some thought leadership and expand the dialogue to keep people coming back. We can all benefit from more content, more links and more exposure.

Need a couple email addresses to spam?

I mentioned yesterday that just a few days ago Zoho shut down its’ demo account because users were inadvertantly saving public documents with very private information in them. Well today in thier blog they mentioned their service Site24×7, which conveniently provides a Demo login and allows you to add email addresses under the Alerts tab. Uh huh…

Raju, likely you should include a warning to users about putting in thier actual email address while using the demo or modify the email address they put in with a ‘-nospam’ attached to the name portion or something before inserting it into the list.

“Security of Web-Based Apps Questioned” - Probably not the last word on this topic…

The “security” issue of web based apps we talked about previously, twice, apparently has come full circle. If you didn’t read before, the general point was that users were saving documents as public which contained some very private information in them on web based spreadsheet and document services. And not just thier own private information, information about other people they might collect during the course of thier job or etc. So simplerich and I had a brief exchange about how this problem might impact the companies that provide these web based apps. My argument being that people won’t blame the posters but will instead blame the software companies even though users should know better.  So even though the security of the providers system was not directly being questioned, the end result it that it would be.

A few days later Zoho  disabled their demo account because “Many users unintentionally leave sensitive data in Zoho Writer’s demo account without realizing that it can be viewed by others. “