The last seven days have been filled with major milestones and announcements. For starters, ShareOffice for AppExchange soft-launched into the salesforce.com AppExchange on Friday May 4. The soft-launch also included an entirely new category in the AppExchange called “Online Office Apps”.
ShareOffice is the world’s first online office based on open Internet standards. In addition to this new approach, ShareOffice has many features that are new for the online office apps space (i.e., “one click” documents, enterprise class document management, rich CRM integration, offline support, desktop integration, etc.).
This launch has been a major effort in stealth mode for the last year with lots of hard work from partners iNetOffice, EditGrid, Preezo, support from salesforce.com, end-users working in beta test mode, and our team too.
On Monday May 7, salesforce.com called ShareOffice the “App of the Week”:
“We always preach the end of proprietary software only to make the quiet and resigned realization that the On-Demand revolution deck we just presented was prepared on Microsoft PowerPoint. We preach software as a service but use Excel to manage our data and spreadsheets. We preach document collaboration via the web but this is usually limited to emailing Word attachments back and forth. Until now…
If Microsoft Office is the perennial Goliath of desktop software, then ShareOffice would be the David of the Business Web. ShareOffice provides an online application for easy and quick creation, management, and sharing of online documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The pre-built templates make creating proposals, quotes, contracts, coversheets, etc. a breeze. Additionally, all the applications integrate with standard Microsoft programs, PDF, OpenOffice, etc. And most importantly, online collaboration becomes so much easier since this management system is on-demand and available wherever you or your customers or employees have internet access. This application ties three great on-demand solutions together in one package for easy use and implementation.”
Following this writeup, ReadWrite Web did a post “ShareOffice Launches Open Standards Based Web Office Suite” and StartupSquad as well. On Tuesday May 8, ShareOffice and the open standards upon which it was based – OpenSAM - were announced in press releases.
The Red Herring did a cover story for RedHerring.com titled “SaaS Consortium Sets Standards” on the same day as the announcement with a highlight below:
“Analysts praised OpenSAM’s approach. “I was impressed with them on two levels,” said Jeffrey Kaplan, managing director of the research firm THINKstrategies. “No. 1, the basic functionality—it does offer a viable alternative to Microsoft. No. 2, they recognize that a lot of companies aren’t willing to give up all their [software]… they offer complements that integrate well” into an enterprise’s existing system.”
Plus the new OpenSAM community site was launched at www.opensam.org complete with lots of technical documents on how to build interoperable apps (and even a fun new animated logo showing a dynamic mash-up). And ten companies in total have lined up to participate in OpenSAM at launch.
The ShareOffice announcement even made it into Twitter… http://twitter.com/QeeGi/statuses/54650022
ShareOffice is one of the first enterprise mash-ups for sale – indeed it is a federated application comprised of best-of-breed on-demand services. It has been a great and exciting collaboration with the founding partners of OpenSAM and ShareOffice and likewise it has been great working with early users of the service. ShareOffice and OpenSAM are off to a good start and we look forward to next steps to realize all of the power and potential with both of these developments.
Posted by Eric Hoffert 
