And again, I bumped into Webisms, though. For example, Zoho Show has specific support for putting notes in your slide show
so that you know what you’re talking about when you’re groveling for VC funding. But it couldn’t accept them as an import
from PowerPoint. Just deleted the whole thing. Most annoying. Had I not had PowerPoint to fall back on, this would have been
a definite Advil-with-Johnny Walker moment.
But nothing compared to my travel moment. Today required a visit to Manhattan to finish a requirements meeting. That was no
trouble because the office had guest Internet access and a steady Wi-Fi connection. But afterward, I had to wait a couple
of hours before my dinner date, so I headed over to Bryant Park and its free Wi-Fi connection. Man, nothing makes your blood
pressure go up quicker than trying to do work on the Web while on a public Wi-Fi connection that drops you more often than
a Hollywood wife.
Friday: Collaboration
I had high hopes. If there’s one thing the Web is good at on its own, it’s collaboration. Heck, Office and SharePoint have
been catching up to wikis, blogs, and message boards for some time. Still, I decided to take a look at this category and try
to combine it with suites of productivity tools rather than just straight teamware, blogging, or wiki providers.
Interestingly, when you go that route, you find several new tools that I missed earlier in the week. Google is still there
-- mostly -- but it’s joined by gOffice, ThinkFree, and Zoho. All of these provide collaboration features, as well as word
processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and even desktop publishing applications.
Unfortunately, gOffice has loads of work to do. Its desktop publishing and presentation sites are still under development.
Its spreadsheet tool is far less feature-rich than Zoho’s or Google’s, and its word processing site has the features but noticeably
slow performance. Finally, “collaboration” really means e-mailing your teammates your progress reports. Last bit of bad news:
They want money. I mean, 99 cents per month when they’re still in a beta phase seems cheeky compared with all the free tools
around.
Google has all the basics, even if they’re a bit disjointed. Your basic office apps are there -- sans any kind of presentation
tool -- and you can form discussion groups about them using the Groups tool. But often, moving between apps means logging
in to Google over and over, and moving data between applications can be difficult.
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(InfoWorld) - In the litigious world we live in, deploying a unified communications platform in your enterprise could...
