Introducing Web 2.0

Okay... today I'm going to blog about On-Line Web Based Productivity applications.

The buzzword is "Web 2.0" which makes it sound like it's some new standard to replace the existing World Wide Web with something new, the Web evolved or something. It's not that at all, well not really. While Web 2.0 is an evolution in Web technology, it's one that has been happening for the past 10-20 years or so, so there's no need to panic and update your browser or contact your ISP about upgrading to Web 2.0... If you do they will probably either laugh at you, or bill you more for the same service.

What makes a web site "Web 2.0" is kind-of grey and fuzzy, the fact is that there are a number of technologies which have been making web pages far more interactive than the original W3C standard alone allows for. Things like Adobes' (formerly Macromedia) Flash, Suns Java, JavaScript, Active Server Pages and other CGI scripting technologies using Perl, PHP and back end databases typically using SQL... added with the specification of W3C standard CSS to create DHTML or Dynamic HTML. Some reasonably bright bods have managed to make these technologies work together in a manner which means that web pages can be as fast and productive as any application on your desktop.

The challenge, up until recently, has been to get each of those parts working together dynamically enough to be effective from the users point of view, without being so restrictive that the user interface is limited to a point where it is difficult for users to transition from working off-line to working on-line.

As I say... this internet integration with the desktop experience has been going on for a long time. Microsoft introduced Active Desktop with IE 4 back on Windows 95 along with the Channel Bar. (Two "features" I hated with a vengeance... but then I had only got 56k dial-up) Yahoo Widgets (formally Konfabulator) and many other desktop Weblets have existed improving this somewhat failed idea, but the timing seems to be right... I believe much of it is about availability of broadband internet and the reduced frustration with slowly downloading pages that cost 45p a minuet, and as web consumers we are all getting much happier about Automatic Updates, XML RSS News Feeds on our desktop and regularly updated Podcasts and instant messaging. There is also a tendency to think of the internet as the World Wide Web. The idea that if it's anything to do with the internet I must have to click the Big Blue E on my desktop or the Compass on my Dock (I'm sorry, but Linux users typically have a more cultured view of internet use) is common place. While we still like to use a separate eMail client, even that is quite commonly done in a web browser when we're not in the office.

Corporate astonishment at employees desire to use the office bandwidth for instant messaging where they wouldn't dream of making personal calls without getting permission has lead to web based access to instant messaging becoming common place, (Thus bypassing the corporate firewalls port blocks on common IM protocols) and so, about the only thing we use a program other than our web browser to access the net is high performance video games and Peer2Peer file sharing. Incidentally, the Phosphor project demonstrates how "high performance" this Browser platform can be, even for video games.

But if instant messaging can operate fast enough, with a presentable enough user interface that people can hold fluent conversations... why can't we do our Word Processing and Spreadsheets in a web page?

Well, the short answer is that you can... and with the current cost of Microsoft Office, and the incompatibility issues with their Works suite, when your out of the workplace, and have access to the internet, you certainly might just as well. (YMMV, but I feel that a home office suite compatible with the workplace should not cost more than about £60 absolute tops. I think Microsoft Office is worth about £25, and definitely not more than a PS3 / X360 Game considering the effort and usefulness of each)

Oh no, Another Anti-Microsoft Rant

Okay... quick pointer about bias. I do, and have always hated Microsofts' Office Suite. It's popularity is (IMHO) purely because it's files have become "a standard" and so it's use has become "a standard". I accept that for many people it is the only tool they know to do the job, and it's far easier to do a job with a tool you know. Presently, although I know that Microsoft have put a lot of effort into improving it's Office product range, I strongly believe that they are asking to high a price for a collection of (while graphically very attractive, in their latest 2007 incarnation) awkward and clumsy tools with proprietary file standards which only became standard in the first place because it came "free" with every new computer purchased.

It's not that it's really really bad software. It's just that it really isn't worth the price they are asking... even in the OEM or Volume Licensing schemes. Especially not when there are cheep to free alternatives like the 602 Suite, OpenOffice, KOffice (soon to be released for Windows and Mac as well as Linux) or combinations like Gnumeric and AbiWord, and I've never felt that it was up to the standard of Lotus SmarSuite or Corel WordPerfect Office Suite, which retail at similarly high prices. So, it's neither cheep nor good, but merely average quality, expensive software. (IMHO)

It's not my place to tell people where to buy their software and I don't hate Microsoft so much I avoid all their products simply because they are Microsoft products. Notice, I'm blogging on a Microsoft Live Space!? There are Microsoft products use and pay for and feel I have got a good deal. I am, however aware that Microsoft has a brand name equivalent to the vast dominance of the total software sales, and that that brand awareness can both carry a price tag, and stifle awareness and therefore take-up of many, arguably more competitive alternatives. What I do feel it is my place to do, as one with an eye on the ground in these areas, is to inform others of the availability of such... and point out the pros and cons of each choice they may make.

The On-Line Office Alternative

Okay, back to the point. What are the options for working your office productivity life without software? And more to the point, what are the advantages and disadvantages?

Well, I've already mentioned Microsofts' 2007 edition of Office, and if you're still using an older version there are some features of the new line up which you should probably be aware of, as you make your decision to upgrade or wait. I've personally found alternate versions of Office to be more acceptable than the next, 2000 is my favorite of all time, XP defaulted completely back to front, looked goofy and had more nag screens than most unregistered shareware, 2003 is much better, 2007 looks remarkably like a low cost budget Office suite and seems (to my eyes) to insist that the user go back to the start of their learning curve... and, as previously stated, pay through the nose for the privilege. Then again, I also said it has some new features and that Microsoft have worked hard to make improvements.

So what are they, and what does this have to do with On-Line Web 2.0 productivity suites? Well, firstly that "standard" office file format has been kind-of thrown to the wind, for a start off. Office 2007 now works on a more open standard XML file format for all it's files, and your file names will have a new "X" appended to the extension (if you show extensions for common file types) to indicate this. XML is of course a Web standard. It places database style information in a plain text file which can easily be transmitted across systems with varying Operating Systems, Time Zones and language configurations without loss or corruption. That brings us to the second part of the question, what does Office 2007 have to do with Web 2.0 Productivity Suites. Well, though Office isn't a MS Product I beta, I am on the beta users lists at Microsoft and get a lot of info on what is going on, and what they are planning. Office 2007 was originally slated to be an on-line only application.

The original idea (as I understood it) was to have a small program which users downloaded, which gave them access to all their documents on-line. The user would no longer be able to save to "My Documents" or eMail their work, and would then be able to get to their documents from any machine which had the new Office installed on it. They would not pay for the download, which would be a constantly maintained package on their system, updated regularly and automatically from the net. Instead they would have to pay a rental fee on their on-line Office space.

The arguments then came back "What about my accounts Spreadsheets? I don't want Microsoft to have access to those?", "How do I share sensitive files with my work collogues and not the rest of the world?", "What about backup? If Microsoft loose my data will I have to sue them?" and the whole idea was put back for a re-think. It's still on the boards though, and you can sign up for a Beta test of Microsofts' Office Live Workspace... I have, and will review it here when it's open, but you have to pre-register to get in.

I Want it Now Now Now!

Of course you do, and others, possibly with less to lose, possibly with more forethought and defiantly with more to gain have already got on-line productivity suites available for your Web 2.0 machine.

I'm going to review 3 packages which (while all still claiming to be Beta) are fairly mature, and usable for a variety of purposes, and mentioning a couple of less critical or less complete applications along the way. The systems I've found most useful are Zoho, ThinkFree Office and Google Docs...? Google? Oh my goodness, they really do have their fingers in every pie now don't they? It's been said before that Google is the new Microsoft, just as Microsoft was the new IBM... This may be true, but I won't bias against Google any more than I bias against MS. With any of these large corporations it is always worth remembering how much you let them know about you... especially where your business and accountancy is concerned.

There are other systems out there, especially if you have a Web Server with Server Side Scripting on which you are prepared (or may even prefer) to host such services yourself. Remember, if you own the server, you are the only one who controls who can see what's on it.

Reviews

I tried all parts of each set of applications, on as many current browsers as I could. I shall review each application by the type of document it handles, though the variety of applications by each provider differs somewhat. I've noted file compatibility, document sharing and collaboration features, and the quality of document translation as fully as I can, in a real-world context.

The browsers I had available to me, and tested were IE7 (Version 7.0.5730.11), Safari 3.0.3(522.15.5), Firefox 2 (Version 2.0.0.8), Maxton 2 (Version 2.0.4.5799) and Avant (11.5 Build 21).

Documents

All three services provide a document service, and ThinkFree actually offer two.

Google

Google Documents is the lightest of the three. The options for formatting are limited but more than adequate. The user interface is clean and simple, and operation is very fast, even on a very modest system. It's also the most heavily web based system... and tested very well on all the browsers I tried. The features it dose support are far superior to WordPad, Write, or Apples TextEdit application, and far superior to the Word Processors I remember back in the days of DOS. It's closer to the original Word for Windows or Works for Windows, Claris Works on Classic Macs etc.

You won't see features like Mail Merge, Forms based templates or WordArt. On the other hand, it can produce far better html output than Word. Of course it does... your looking at it in your web browser aren't you?

The available fonts are limited to commonly accepted fonts for Web Pages, but then, how many fonts do you really need? We don't seem to notice the limited number of fonts on the Web, and every letter I receive in the post seems to use some form of Helvetica clone (Lucida Grande / Arial) type font, or a Times (Times New Roman / Garamon / Baskerville) type font... Deco fonts are rare outside publishing houses and the classroom, since they just aren't pleasant on the eyes.

Clipart, photos, graphs, charts and editable tables are all highly doable, and word wrapping options are complete with no problems. Having said that, you would have to have Table formatting, since there is no tab bar, and no indication of the margins of the page. Words wrap around the paragraph like a web page, and are only fixed to the margins when you choose to print. It's also, only at the print stage that you get to choose between European and US paper sizes.

Print quality is fairly reasonable. However, with the variable page size, I have had images end up overlapping tables when you come to print out. Of course you can always save a PDF and print that instead. This is a good call if you are not sure of the print quality or availability of your web browser.

  Speaking of which, the export options are well rounded. Word Documents, Portable Documents (Largely read only, but available on any system), OpenOffice Documents ("Open Document Text", the Industry agreed standard XML based document, supported by just about everything EXCEPT Microsoft Office), RTF Rich Text (the older standard cross-platform editable formatted text format), Plain ASCII Text and HyperText Markup are all available for export and most for import. If you can find a Word Processor or Text Editor that can't support one of these formats, you are a better software hunter than I... then again, why would you want it?

Working with the system is a breeze, once you get over the initial learning curve. Right clicking context menus and such are pretty much like any generic word processor. The Tabbed interface is actually really nice for switching the context of the toolbar, and economic on screen real estate. Sending a Google Doc via eMail sends an HTML eMail which is infinitely more accessible to everyone than an attached Word Document. If print formatting is a concern, I'd advise attaching a PDF rather than the Word format, especially as this will resolve any font issues, unless you really want the person receiving it to edit it and send it back. That practice, however, should become a thing of antiquity if Web 2.0 Apps take off as they should, since you can simply provide a collaboration link in the eMail and then they can edit it on-line, from your space.

The Revisions tab also adds a feature not commonly found on desktop PCs at present. Should you find, for any reason that you want to go back to an earlier version of the document, you can do so quite simply with this feature. I often see people with backups of older versions of their documents, frequently because they haven't gotten around to creating a template and working up new documents from that, but then, if the feature isn't used... there must be something wrong with it? Right? It may be that it simply isn't publicised well enough in the application, or that us techie types who end up doing most of the training have no need for it, and neglect to pass the details on to the office admins for whom it is a real time saver. In any case... Revisions is not so advanced an idea, but infinitely easier to manage, and, in Google Docs at least, very clearly visible feature.

Just so you know, this feature is now premiering on the new Mac OS X 10.4 Leopard OS released this month where it is available for any file produced in any application on the PC. I haven't Betaed Leopard so I really can't say much about how it works there, but the concept was familiar to me from Google Docs & Spreadsheets. There are High End or Experimental Linux/Unix Filesystems with this capability, essentially trying to get around the Hot-Desking "Trash Can" vs. restoring from a Tape Backup problem. Again, this solution is not as simple as Googles.

Google Docs is also available on mobile phones and PDAs...

ThinkFree Office

ThinkFree is the opposite in most respects, both in regard to Documents and every other form of file. Their whole premise is to make you think you have MS Office in a Web Page. The colour of the toolbars here is grey only because that's how my desktop theme is, and how it know's what theme I'm using, I couldn't say. The look is almost identical to Office 2003, the feel is the same, and the features are not far short.

A page is a page in ThinkFree, Documents are Word Documents, and the Tab bar is fully functional, as this rather complex document clearly shows... Actually, compared to the original OpenOffice document I formatted up from the ReadMe.txt file that came with SYSLINUX, there are some minor line spacing issues... but OpenOffice isn't MS Office is it?

ThinkFree produces excellent PDF output too, and considering the number of PDF writer plugins sold for use in Office, and the number of free and commercial PDF Printer simulations, this is probably quite a big factor in ThinkFrees' favor. Of course the same goes for the other offerings, but none of them are quite as completely Office like as ThinkFree.

The biggest let down of ThinkFree is the import & export formats. The image illustration is from the Premium Desktop version (more on that later) and yet still, aside from the PDF, Rich Text and HTML formats, the only availability is Word, and some formats which are hardly appropriate for this kind of file.

SVG files are similar to uncompressed PDF files, a rather less branded version of Adobes PostScript or the Macromedia (now also Adobe) Flash files. XML is a very standard format, but without formatting as MS or OpenDocument there is no context to make sense of an XML file as a word processed document. Plain Text is as Plain Text does. It's unformatted, and quite honestly, you don't need a word processor for that.

On the plus side of this, it does support both traditional Word (97-2000) format files and the new Word 2007 DocX files, and as a free converter it scores over the Microsoft filter in being bi-directional and installation free.

All the fonts on the system you are working on are available in ThinkFree, just as they are in Word. However, in terms of collaboration, this could be a negative, unless you can guarantee that all collaborators have access to the fonts you are using and will stick rigidly to those fonts in any edits they make.

The other big let down is the speed and responsiveness. The illustration to the right is one of 3 to 5 which attempt to keep you amused as the system gets going. Although it is supposedly cached, that assumes that you (or someone else) uses the same machine to access ThinkFree regularly, and as open access machines keep caches for different users in different places, and often clear them at log off anyway, I don't find this assurance very comforting. The mention of Network Speed is not very reassuring either, I use a 20Meg/sec connection at home, and the initial start up was like waiting for YouTube to start on 56K Dial-up. Successive openings were about 1/3 or the time, but that's still quite long enough to get the gist of the splash pages.

On the other hand ThinkFree Premium Desktop allows you to keep the application on your computer (for free) and work on documents off-line, and upload them to your 1GB ThinkFree space when you choose to go (on-line) work on them away from home or the office, and re-sync your TFP space with your TFO space later on.

If you're worried about syncing up your office Mac with your home Windows/Linux box or Laptop, fret no longer, as TFOffice Premium is a Java Application and will run on any system with the Sun Java VM Framework installed and up to date, and is available in an OS X package, a Windows Setup.exe and a Linux shell install.

I haven't attempted to make any of these work on my PC-BSD box yet, but either Wine or a BSD BASH shell script should cope with this task admirably. The on-line, in your browser version, of course will work on absolutely any OS, and I see no reason why QNX or BeOS (or derivatives) couldn't run it just as well, provided you can get a current version of Java installed. If you know differently please let me know, as this is actually an important consideration here. The requirements Google Docs & Spreadsheets places on the browser are much less stringent, but we should also consider that most mobile phones can run Java applications to some extent.

The GB spelling checker is very good, and that also important for this implementation, as browser based based spelling plugins (which I commonly use in both IE and Firefox) will not pick up spelling errors inside the Java application.

It's my feeling that ThinkFree is targeted at a slightly different audience than Google. Where Google are going for the user who has the occasional need to draft something up before going to work, or people who have a need to perform collaborative documentation across organisations with vastly different IT infrastructures, ThinkFree is definitely targeting people who like Office, but don't like the amount of hard disk space, compatibility issues, system slowdown on occasional use, and high purchase price of that package. The TCO (total cost of ownership) that Microsoft frequently sight as one of their server systems greatest benefits (and I think that is a fair claim) are clearly not followed through with their productivity suite. If they don't wise up, I can see this as a positive alternative for many users.

Zoho

Zoho Writer sits nicely in between the two alternatives. There are a wide selection of tools, the layout is much more like a word processing application than a web page, and yet the application clearly is running in the browser without any VM Applet layer. Nothing is installed on a regular system, and response is good.

Zoho Writer imports and exports all the regular standard formats of word processed document, though it lacks the Word 2007 DOCX format which allows ThinkFree to act as an effective converter between Word 97-2003 and the newer 2007 form. It does still list the older Sun Star Office format over Google, but current versions of Star Office should also support the Open Document format, since Star Office is only a commercial version of OpenOffice.

Many of the people who worked on the Open Document standard have contributed heavily to that Open Source project, leading to Open Document files being the standard for OpenOffice.

That said, if you are interested in obtaining the commercial Star Office from Sun, over the freeware open source OpenOffice, but would rather not pay the $69.95 (at time of writing) that Sun are asking for a direct sale, Google are offering version 8 (the current version, again at time of writing) as part of the Google Pack. Their asking price is nothing, and they assure that this is no trial, and not sponsored. However, I couldn't say that I would expect the support line offered by Sun to be extended to Google Pack sub-licensees. OpenOffice has a very active User Support forum on-line, so the only reason I can see for wanting to use Star Office, is that technical support help line, but I imagine Google would support their sub-licence just as they do the other Pack programs.

My biggest quibble with Zoho is that, like Google, it doesn't support tab points properly. There is a tab bar in Zoho, so there must be some intention for this feature, and Tabs do work, provided you don't want anything other than standard 1" left aligned Tabs.

Again, with my formatted SysLinux document you can see that the Light Blue code section headings should be aligned left, with the areas of the script that this element is applicable to, aligned hard to the right margin. That, doesn't happen. The rendering of the boxed out sections is pretty good, though none of the products managed the shadow I assigned in my desktop word processor.

Zoho have a nice plugins for Firefox and IE6+ called QuickRead which allow you to view common office documents you might find laying around the Web, inside your browser window without starting another application. They also provide a special version formatted for use on your Apple iPhone called iZoho... I imagine this would work well on PDAs other Smart Phones and even devices like iPod Touch or Sony PSP. And they have a plugin for Microsoft Office, meaning you can move gradually to on-line working, and retain the speed and efficiency of your office environment while accessing your files on the go in a lower performance environment.

There are code inserts for Blogs and FaceBooks, space to upload files to instead of attaching them to eMails and a whole slew of other document sharing and conversion tools and APIs available, and server systems for corporate users who wish to brand Zoho products and provide the service to their employees themselves as part of their corporate business strategy.

All in, I have to say, I think Zoho have a lot to offer and deserve to succeed in a big way... if they don't I it will only be through poor marketing.

Word Processing Summery

You can check out the original print formatting of that SysLinux Document on my Public SkyDrive with the link below.

It was produced in OpenOffice from a plain text file.

Features

Next Time

Okay... I've delayed this as much as I can, and it's already a huge post. Personal stuff has come up that I need to sort out, but I plan to release the next post about on-line Spreadsheets, then Presentation, then Databases and other tools.

So I'll see you all next time.

Aside Note: Please note that I prefer to Link than Cite. You can verify my comments or statements, many of which are my own personal opinion and many are contested / contestable. There are those that agree and those who don't. My links are intended to give you a starting point in understanding where my views and information come from, and decide if you agree with them or think I'm talking a load of rubbish. Additional research may be required of the reader, if they're knowledge contradicts my teachings here in... or if you just don't trust me. I try to be as open and un-opinionated as I can, but I am but one, unedited man.