Online Office Suites

When it comes to the workhorses of business software—word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software—the Microsoft Office suite has ruled the corporate roost for more than a decade. Anyone remember WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, or Harvard Graphics? Like Pete Best—the onetime member of the Beatles who was dismissed before the band hit the big time—those once-famous applications were relegated to bystander status as Office became the preeminent office application suite. Corel, IBM, and Harvard Graphics were slow to port their wares to Windows, and history has proven the folly of being slow to adapt to changes in the market. Some might argue that Microsoft’s overly aggressive pricing and ability to bundle Office with new PCs had more of an impact on the fate of those applications, but the outcome isn’t in dispute: Microsoft became the dominant provider of business application software with Office and hasn’t looked back.

Fast forward to 2008: Today, Microsoft Office is fending off challenges from new competitors. Thanks in part to the remarkable growth of the Internet and the explosion of high-speed Internet access, a new generation of Web applications is beginning to compete with traditional office-productivity products such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Unlike traditional applications that are installed and maintained on a local client, these online apps live entirely on the Web, and their files reside on the application provider’s file servers. For example, Google Docs lets you create, edit, print, and save spreadsheet, word processor, and presentation documents without needing to install an application on your PC. These products also leverage the strengths of the Internet by allowing for the easy sharing of documents among office workers who are separated geographically from one another. And here’s the kicker: Most of these online apps are free (or very low cost), which has captured the interest of many cashstrapped IT managers.

The sheer number and diversity of online apps has mushroomed over the past few years: Online word processors such as Adobe Buzzword and Coventi Pages allow documents to be created, edited, and shared online, and online spreadsheets such as Team and Concept’s EditGrid and TrimPath’s Num Sum do the same for workbooks. Even Dan Bricklin—the co-creator of VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet—has entered the online app arena with Software Garden’s wikiCalc. All of this development is good news, but do any of these online applications really have a chance of unseating Office as the premier business application suite? To find out, I’ve compared five of the most popular online office products that offer word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation capability: Ajax13, Silveroffice gOFFICE, Google Docs, ThinkFree Online, and the Zoho office suite. Instacoll’s Live Documents office suite was announced at press time, but Instacoll didn’t respond to our invitation to participate in this review. Transmedia’s Glide Business offers online applications but also includes extensive OS replacement features that are beyond the scope of this review.

Although Microsoft has been slow to respond to the challenge these newcomers present, it has begun to articulate a new “Software plus Services” strategy that attempts to combine the strengths of the traditional Office applications with the improved flexibility and collaborative nature of Web applications. The beta of Microsoft Live Office Workspace, which was announced just before press time, is a product of that strategy. (For more information, see the sidebar “Microsoft Office Live Workspace: A Winning Strategy?”.)

To test how well these online office suites compete with (and work together with) Microsoft Office, I created sample Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents, then used each of the online suites to load, edit, save, and print each document. If any application couldn’t import the documents, I created an approximation of each document manually by using the relevant application’s editing tools. Table 1 provides a price- and feature-comparison summary of all five products.

Finally, in the interest of fairness, all of these products are classified as betas in development by their vendors. Nearly all exhibited minor glitches or bugs, so you’ll want to consider criticisms of the behavior of certain program functions in that context.

Google Docs
Although Google Docs is the most well-known online product that replicates some of the functionality of Microsoft Office, it isn’t—as of this writing—the best Web-based alternative to Office. Google Docs is available in a free edition for home and small-business use, and Google also offers a Premier Edition that includes extra features—mainly security and support features— for business use. For example, the Premier Edition includes APIs that let Google Docs integrate easily with an existing IT infrastructure, offers 25GB of storage space per account (the free version offers 2.75GB), and provides access to Postini spam control and other business-oriented features.

Google Docs did an admirable job preserving the appearance of my sample Word document and left most of the formatting intact. The test PowerPoint document was imported without too many glitches, although some text overflowed existing text boxes, and font sizes varied from the original Word document. The Excel document was larger than the 1MB size limit Google Docs imposes for Excel documents, but smaller worksheets loaded without problems.

The ability to share documents with others and easily track shared document revisions is a slick feature, and the recent release of Google Gears—an API that enables online applications that use it to be run offline— promises to make Google Docs even more useful. You can save documents that you create with Google Docs locally for editing with other applications, but the current version of Google Docs can’t edit documents offline. (Ironically, Zoho Writer uses Google Gears to provide offline document-editing features.)

Google Docs can be a good choice for home and small-office work, but the limited feature set means it isn’t ready to replace Office for the majority of users. That said, the document collaboration features are usable, Google Gears shows great promise for improving integration between online and offline files, and Google will undoubtedly upgrade the functionality of Google Docs in the months and years to come.

Silveroffice gOFFICE
Silveroffice’s gOFFICE combines an online word processor, spreadsheet, and desktop publishing program. The vendor claims that a graphical presentation application will be available soon, but it was unavailable for testing at press time.

gOFFICE is available in one edition for personal and business use priced at 99 cents per month. The spreadsheet module in gOFFICE offers the ability to import Excel documents, but the word processing application doesn’t: You need to either create your documents from scratch online or cut and paste them into the document workspace from another word processing program. The word processing and spreadsheet modules have a very limited feature set, but both are easy to use—the lack of program features will turn off many business users, but getting up to speed with how to create, edit, save, and print documents is a straightforward process.

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