BLOGS

Teaching and Learning Center Blog

Where's Your Office in a Flat World - The Webware Wars

Posted on:Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:03:58 EST by: Mike Qaissaunee

In our last posting, we talked about Google Docs and Spreadsheets, probably the most prominent example of Webware. Webware is a new class of web-based applications that attempt to match the richness and responsiveness of desktop computer applications in an online environment. This week we consider The Webware Wars. Among the factors that have led to the proliferation of webware are: increased adoption of high-speed internet, greater bandwidth, cheap storage and a new dynamic and interactive web architecture enable by a collection of technologies referred to as Web 2.0 and AJAX.Everybody's getting into the act, including big players like Microsoft and Google, and little fish like Zoho and Thinkfree.

New Features in Google Docs and Spreadsheets
As with any Google product, new features are quietly added with little notice or fanfare. Since we last talked about Google docs and Spreadsheets (GDS), there have been a number of additions and improvements - mostly on the spreadsheets side of the house. The first addition is actually within Gmail -Google's popular web-based email. In the past, when a Gmail user received an email attachment (either word or excel) the only option was to open the attachment as an an html document-viewing only, or download and open the attachment. Now when a users receives an excel document, they have the option of opening that spreadsheet directly in GDS - presumably, a similar functionality will eventually be available for word documents.

GoogleLookup
GoogleLookup is a new feature in the spreadsheets portion of the GDS that takes advantage of the online nature of GDS. In fact, it's a formula in the spreadsheet that attempts to answer a question by using information from the web. The syntax is fairly straightforward:
=GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute") [the double quotes are required!]
Some examples include:

looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")]
when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]
=GoogleLookup("Springfield, MA", "population") gives us 152,082
=GoogleLookup("NJ", "population") gives us 8,414,350

If you mouse over the cell, you'll see links to the source pages. Below we list some of the additional types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names (some entities won't have all these attributes, and some will have more, so experiment):

Countries and Territories: population, capital, largest city, gdp
U.S. States: area, governor, nickname, flower
Cities and Towns: state, mayor, elevation
Musicians/Actors: date of birth, place of birth, nationality
U.S. Presidents/Politicians: date of birth, place of birth, political party
Chemical Compounds/Elements: chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, densityatomic number, discovered by, atomic weight
Planets/Stars: number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere,constellation, distance, mass, temperature
Companies: employees, ceo, ticker

This feature isn't foolproof - there are a number of lookups I tried that didn't work - yet, so don't expect a whole lot, but have fun with it. As this feature improves, it's pretty easy to see the myriad possibilities that live spreadsheet data will enable and empower.

GoogleFinance
While GoogleLookup provides access to a wide variety of data, another new feature, GoogleFinance provides just financial data pulled from the Google Finance website. Using a similar syntax, you can look up the price of Google stock [=GoogleFinance("GOOG")] or the 52-week high of Apple [=GoogleFinance("AAPL", "HIGH52")]. And since this type of data changes fairly frequently, they are updated in your spreadsheet automatically.

Improved Publishing
Google has also improved web-based publishing of spreadsheets. You can publish your entire spreadsheet (or just one sheet of it) so that other people can view it as HTML, orPDF - without having to sign in to a Google Account. The HTML even updates is the original spreadsheet changes.

Thinkfree http://www.thinkfree.com/common/main.tfo
A new addition to the webware wars is Thinkfree and their online office suite. Like GDS, Thinkfree provides online access to Word and Excel documents - what differentiates it is (1) the addition of Show - to create, view and present powerpoint presentations and (2) the ability to create charts in calc - their version of Excel. Thinkfree provides 1 Gig of space for their Thinkfree Write, Calc and Show suite. The collaboration and revisioning features are very similar to GDS. I would rate the interface a little cleaner and more user-friendly - Thinkfree refers to your online documents as your webtop, as opposed to your desktop. Like GDS, the architecture is AJAX-based, but Thinkfree uses JAVA as well. Another interesting feature that the Thinkfree suite provides is a doc exchange - an online repository that users can publish their documents to and share with one another - in fact this feature allows for a variety of creative commons licensing options. Another neat option is the Bulletin Board - sort of a guest book, where you can view all of your published and blogged files, collaborate with other Thinkfree users and get feedback from people all over the world.

Thinkfree's Online office suite is just one of a number of products that they have launched. In addition to the free online version, there are commercial versions available including a server version, a desktop version and a portable version. The desktop and server versions are cross-platform, running on Windows, MAC and Linux and are reasonably priced ($50 desktop, server pricing starts at $30 per user per year). The portable addition runs on a U3 drive - similar to a USB drive, but with the ability to run applications - see http://www.u3.com/default.aspx for more info on U3 technology. Finally, there's a version of portable show (powerpoint) for the iPod.

Solodox http://www.solodox.com
Not nearly as far along in development as either GDS or Thinkfree is Solodox. In fact, on their website, the product is listed as an alpha - in the nomenclature of software development and testing, alpha-testing is internal testing that occurs before the software is made available to the public for beta-testing. So why bother discussing a product that's not ready for prime time? Well what's unique about Solodox is that in addition to providing a web-based word processor with features similar to other such products (creating, editing and sharing documents) Solodox also provide an online project feature. The distributed nature of projects and project management really lends itself to a web-based collaborative application and thusSolodox is a welcome addition to the Webware world. The one current drawback of Solodox is that it only supports the Internet Explorer browser.

As you can see there's a lot of activity in this space and webware has the potential - really for the first time - to put a great deal of pressure on Microsoft to improve and innovate their Office suite - a good thing for all end-users!

As always, please send your comments and feedback to me at mqaissaunee@brookdalecc.edu - we hope to be able to allow comments right here on the blog - soon. Have a great holiday! MQ

Return to BLOG Content Guide