Week 5 - Web Office Tools

OK, now I'm excited - does that make me a geek?

I stumbled across Google Docs awhile ago and immediately loved it - the idea and the implementation. Thanks for the links to the other office tool suites, though - Zoho in particular looks interesting and has some tools that Google doesn't offer yet so I may wind up using both. Or more, who knows!

I definitely think this is the future of most software products - some of the more computationally intensive things like video editing or the like will probably not work well enough as web apps for some time to come. And I do think there's a need to be able to do things offline (but Google Gears allows for this, and most of these web-based tools allow you to move stuff up and down between your local computer and the remote service - not always easily but that's getting better and better too). There are also issues with security and privacy - the more you share and store stuff remotely the more likely there could be problems (so I can see hospitals working with patient data, or anyone working with personnel data as two areas where there's not likely to be a web app solution anytime soon). The security and privacy issues also get worse when you think that maybe one company (like Google) might do the right thing but somewhere down the road be forced by the government to divulge data they said they'd keep confidential, or they might get bought out by a still Larger Company which doesn't do as good a job as the old one did but you don't get to do anything about it.

As someone who has tried to manage both an intranet and a shared drive with Novell the idea of a remotely stored set of documents and applications to get at them is manna from heaven. The only real issue is getting people up to speed on the concept and starting to use them in day to day work. For now they're used more for collaboration or as examples of what will be possible, but I hope to change that (myself and where I work). I'm still rather old school in that I take notes in a text editor and save them on my laptop, sharing in other formats when asked for something. A colleague has been using Docs for awhile now. I suspect before long I'll follow her lead but so far the idea of needing multiple people to access or share something hasn't been something so strong that its pushed me to make that change (and most of the people I collaborate with locally have been made aware of Google Docs but aren't yet willing to go there yet).

I'm really intrigued by something I heard about at Computers in Libraries which allows you to take web apps and sort of pull them out of the browser, almost turning them into desktop applications. I can't say why but I think when that's ready for prime time that will be the death knell for lots of shrinkwrapped software. Many people are already going to downloadable software and entertainment media as is - when there's not a big need to do the download part because you can fire up the web app and start working with the latest version right then and there it will be a wonderful day. There will still be people like me who like the physical media of, say, music CDs or movies on DVD, but for software I'd just love to be done with the whole muss and fuss of updating, installing, proving I own it, etc etc.