Piling on - Office and collaboration

September 18, 2007 |

A series of announcements recently almost make it sound like the industry is “piling on” when it comes to office and collaboration products.

“In the retail channel, sales to date this year show Office having a 96 percent dollar share and 98 percent dollar share in the commercial market.” It’s exactly that massive market share and the billions spent that explains why we have seen more interest in office alternatives in the past year.

Over the last few days, several very interesting announcements have indicated that the starting gun has sounded and the race has begun.

  • IBM making the Lotus Symphony suite freely available. Lotus Symphony is made up of three applications–word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation programs–which IBM already ships as part of Lotus 8. The name Lotus Symphony is recycled; it was the name of a desktop spreadsheet application that Lotus offered in the early 1990s. In this renewed desktop software push, IBM is offering an “open” alternative to Microsoft’s proprietary Office product line. The software is based on the Eclipse open-source framework and natively supports the OpenDocument Format, or ODF, a standard document format derived from the OpenOffice open-source desktop suite.

    “It’s not about the document on the desktop anymore. It’s all about making information universally accessible and putting it to work on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways.”

  • Free Anytime Collaboration. Those of us that have become dependent on free conference calls can now add a new addiction: free web-based web conferences. With Vyew, people can create VyewBooks to share, present, and interact with other people around all forms of content such as office files, pictures, audio and video. Tools to create new presentations are also included within the suite. Participants can also share their desktop view for live sharing of files, images, and Web sites.

    “Vyew isn’t just another WebEx or GotoMeeting where information is communicated in a canned one-to-many format. Vyew is an enterprise-class social computing platform where people can also create, share, and participate with rich content in a many-to-many relationship, both in real-time and asynchronously over time.”

  • Google Presentations. Google Presentations is a decent free, Web-based solution for creating slide shows. The collaboration features are really the service’s strong point. Not only can other people collaborate on the same presentation, but when you are done, you can either share it via a public URL or present it to a group of people that you invite. This is really where Google gets it right. Google Presentations sports a subset of Powerpoint capabilities, but it will sure work for 95% of the presentations I do. Very cool.
  • Yahoo grabs Zimbra. Zimbra developed a leading edge, Web 2.0 open source messaging and collaboration software suite, with email, calendar, document processing and a spreadsheet. Zimbra has a browser-based client and supports Windows, Apple, and Linux desktops, as well as Microsoft Outlook a variety of mobile devices. On the server side, Zimbra supports Red Hat, Mac, Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora. Zimbra will be used to take Yahoo mail to new markets.

Any of these announcements by themselves would be significant, but the combination of these is really sounding the starting pistol for competition in the multi-billion dollar office productivity race. And this time around, it is not a one horse race.

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Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. Michael Dolan Dot Com » John Cherry covers latest announcements around collaboration and office suites on September 18, 2007 1:33 pm

    […] http://www.linux-foundation.org/weblogs/cherry/2007/09/18/piling-on-office-and-collaboration/ Any of these announcements by themselves would be significant, but the combination of these is really sounding the starting pistol for competition in the multi-billion dollar office productivity race. And this time around, it is not a one horse race. Posted by md on September 18th, 2007 | Filed in Google, Desktop, Linux Foundation, Vendors, Open Standards, Open Source Software, ODF, IBM, Linux | […]

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