Office 2.0 was a great conference, all around. How often do you get the opportunity to connect with a group of like minded people at the earliest stages of inventing a new way of working online? Better yet, this was a chance to start working with a passionate community to realize the Office 2.0 vision. I’m looking forward to the next event – with more customers on stage, and seeing all of online office apps working together to serve the needs of end-users…
Office 2.0 was also a big event for ShareMethods and our new partner iNetOffice. ShareMethods and iNetOffice made a major announcement at the conference and developed an advanced multi-way mash-up demo which was featured in an opening session at the conference (along with demos from Zoho, ThinkFree, gOffice, and Joyent). The release is below:
- iNetOffice and ShareMethods Join Forces to Create Online Office Mashup and Ajax Mashup Specification
The demo and the announcement received major coverage in the media including a cover story in Computerworld online.
- Computerworld Cover Story – http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9004102
- AjaxWorld – http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/284400.htm
- CIO (India) – http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=2207
Our hope and vision for the mash-up work and the technical spec is to transition from a model of a single proprietary desktop platform for office productivity to a model where the Internet is a platform for a plug-and-play productivity suite – built on open Internet standards and offering users more choice, more services, a democratization of office tools, faster time to innovation, and more. Rather than emulating Microsoft Office on the web, we are looking at the bigger picture of how to combine online office apps into useful solutions for end-users.
One important point about the media coverage above – the article positions our technical recommendation for Simple Ajax Mashup as a fight against Google and Microsoft. However – to be clear – our intent is to provide a spec that will include the ability to share documents, handle single sign-on, and support cut and paste across applications from everybody including, and most likely as very important participants, both Google and Microsoft. When an end-user can access all online office services easily, sharing data transparently, copying and pasting data as needed, logging in only once to any one of these applications, then the job will be done.
Another blog comment is below (Rafe Needleman, CNET):
“First up, Sharemethods, showing a “multi-way mashup,” combining several online tools, including Google, Salesforce.com, iNetWord, and Thumbstacks… It was an impressive display of how you can mash different online applications together — a word processor, a presentation tool, sales management, and other tools. This demo reminded me of a Microsoft pitch: A made-up company doing tasks that were invented to show off technology. Realistically, most companies will start with smaller projects. Still, the demo shattered one of my big misconceptions: That it is nearly impossible to get online productivity tools from different vendors to work together. Enterprises, it turns out, can make mashups, too.”
Posted by Eric Hoffert 
Posted by Eric Hoffert 
