Online Office Programs

Online Office Suites seem to be the next big thing these days. I hadn't actually tried one until today, but there have been a couple available for awhile now. The one I tried was linked by LifeHacker and is put out by a company called ThinkFree. It is written completely in Java, and loads fine in all the browsers I tried it with (even though I'm using Linux). Since I use Linux, I was presented with a small window saying that it had been tested on Windows XP and that better support for Linux and OSX is in the works, but it still works very well. The service gives you 30M to store your files in, and offers a pdf export feature. The interface is kind of a cross between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, and includes word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs, using mostly Microsoft's formats, which are pretty much the standard these days.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft also has a similar suite in beta, which I haven't bothered to try, because it is not quite as cross platform as the ThinkFree product. It is associated with "Live" beta. The server is really slow right now, so I don't have too much more information at the moment, but last time I checked, they had some video conferencing/collaboration software with it as well, in a closed public beta. I haven't seen anything about price, but I expect there will be one, eventually.

As for some others:

gOFFICE is another complete suite, which looks very promising. I don't have too many details because I haven't tried it, but feel free to leave some feedback on how it is if you use it.

Writely offers a web based word processor, similar to the ThinkFree one. While I haven't bothered to try it, it looks pretty good. Both Writely and the ThinkFree suite offer options to post documents to blogs and share them.

NumSum is offering a web based spreadsheet program.
 
FCKeditor is a web based  text/html editor with some word processing features (the interface looks similar to MS Word 97 from the screenshots)


If you are interested in the technology behind these apps, many of them are using a fairly new web standard called AJAX (made popular by Google, among others). Forbes has an article about some of the services mentioned above and AJAX. Read it Here.

With any luck the filters at school don't block these, as they all have the potential for being very convenient for those of us who work on documents on a variety of computers at home and school/work. ;-)