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Google Says Don’t Quit Microsoft Office Yet

J.R. Bookwalter — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 14:55:03 -0600

Don’t put all of your eggs in the cloud’s ample basket — or in this case, Google Docs — right now. At least that’s the opinion of Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise division, who recently warned that their cloud-based Google Docs is not ready to fully dethrone Microsoft Office.

In an interview with ZDNet Asia, the exec confesses that Docs is “much less mature” than other Google web apps such as Gmail or Calendar. “We wouldn’t ask people to get rid of Microsoft Office and use Google Docs because it is not mature yet,” Girouard explains. “We know it.” As one of Google’s four presidents, his message carries a lot of weight behind it.

But that caution is only temporary. In the next year, Google expects somewhere between 30 and 50 updates to Google Docs, making the feature set more robust and improving performance at the same time. After that, Girouard says, Google Docs should be powerful enough to handle the “vast majority’s needs.”

Girouard is quick to point out that Microsoft Office is “an overkill tool for most people” — a quote that Computerworld seems to interpret that even with a souped-up Docs, it won’t be a feature-for-feature competitor for Office.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is forging ahead with its own web-based version of Office in an effort to thwart Google Docs’ momentum. Time will tell if word processing and number crunching in the cloud will take off, but in any event there should be some good competition vying for your attention in the next year.

Microsoft vs. Google - The Battle of Online Office Suites

Christine Chan — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:38:58 -0500

Microsoft announced that it will begin widespread testing of Office 2010. In addition to the desktop app, Microsoft also announced that a web-based version of Office 2010 will be availble for "free." Well free for Windows Live users.

Microsoft said at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 that they will invite tens of thousands of customers to begin testing Microsoft Office 2010. The latest offering from Richmond boasts plenty of new features including: broadcast and video editing in PowerPoint, new data visualizations in Excel, and co-authoring in Word.

Then there's the online part.

Noticing Google's increasing popularity with Docs, Microsoft will have accompanying Office Web applications, with ads, available to over 400 million Windows Live users for no cost. The service will also be available on-premises for those that are Office volume licensing customers and by Microsoft Online Services, where customers can buy a subscription to Office Web as part of a hosted offering.

There is a Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview site, where Microsoft states:

Office Web Applications, the online companion to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote applications, allow you to access documents from anywhere. You can even simultaneously share and work on documents with others online. View documents across PCs, mobile phones, and the Web without compromising document fidelity. Create new documents and do basic editing using the familiar Office interface.

Microsoft Office 2010 will be available to purchase sometime in the first half of next year, and they have reduced the versions from eight to five. There has been no word on Office for Mac since this announcement, but it will more than likely make an appearance with a Mac version as well, which will no doubt utilize the web services as well.

Does this make you like/want Office more than before? Will you use it over the free Google Docs? Let us know!

MobileMe or MobileYours? Is 'The Cloud' About to Shower Strangers with Your Data?

Michelle Delio — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 04:12:00 -0500

Before you head off into "The Cloud," plant your feet firmly on the ground and figure out how to protect yourself and your data from legal and privacy threats as well as technological snafus, outright failures and other interesting occurrences.

As you’ve likely noticed, Cloud computing is the newest big idea that’s going to magically solve all our “pain points” -- that’s a marketing department term for the things that drive you insane with frustration. The annoyances that you can appease by wrapping yourself in a puffy white computing cloud include, lack of easy access to your stuff when you’re using various computers and devices, and problems encountered when sharing your stuff with others.

But for every problem solved by technology, another problem is created. When you use Cloud-computing applications like Web mail, iDisk and Google Docs, the program and your data don’t live on your local hard drive, they’re stored somewhere out there on the service provider’s hardware. The way it’s supposed to work is that you and your chosen others can effortlessly access this data from any compatible device, using a web browser, whenever desired.

It all sounds so swell … until those puffy white clouds turn dark and a hard rain falls on our happy little ethereal computing wonderland. The mail service goes down, the service provider goes out of business, somebody hacks something and your personal data is stolen, etc.

And there are some ominous thunder rumbles from the legislative branch of the US government stating that any data you have stored in The Cloud may not be as private as you might expect. By placing it in a venue where you, so say some legislators, had no expectation of privacy, you’re also entitled to less legal protection than you would if you kept that same data safely tucked away on your own personal computer. For a more detailed discussion of how privacy and The Cloud might work, there’s a useful post on the University of Chicago’s Law School Blog.

In general, e-mail isn’t ever the best way to conduct discussions about clandestine or criminal activities. Should you need to consult with your partners in crime, and you really want to do so using email, consider restricting those exchanges to a private, paid non-webmail account -- a recent court ruling (Warshak v. United States) indicates you have more expectations of privacy in a legal sense when you aren’t using remotely stored e-mail. Preferably, anything that you wouldn’t print on the back of a postcard should be encrypted when sent in email -- if that’s too much of a hassle, pick up a phone. And do resist any bizarre inclinations you may have to use Cloud services to back up documentation of your illegal, or super-secret activities.

And while it’s not likely that any of the big webmail services will go out of business tomorrow, a quick glance at the latest headlines demonstrates that we’re living in strange financial times. If losing the e-mails (and contact information) stored in a webmail account would cause you financial or emotional harm, back ‘em up. Apple provides mail backup instructions for the obviously-cursed-by-an-evil-stepmother-at-birth MobileMe service here, Gmail instructions are here. For Hotmail, you can download MacFreePops and use it to move Hotmail messages into Mac OS X Mail. If you use Yahoo mail, you’re out of luck in the backing up department unless you spring for Yahoo Mail Plus at a cost of $19.99 a year.

If you’re backing up data into the cloud, first read the privacy policy of the hosting company (yes, you really have to, sorry) to make sure they don’t claim rights over the data stored on their infrastructure. Send them an e-mail if there are any stipulations that you don’t understand and ask for clarification. Be aware that policies change whenever our corporate overlords find a new way to make a dime, so re-check the policy periodically. And think hard about storing critical or highly personal data anywhere that is not under your personal control.

All that said, good backup practices dictate that we should have a redundant copy of our most important data in a remote location, far away from the floods, fires, and other hellish events that might make Backup A inaccessible. If your livelihood depends on your data, backing up onto a remote cloud server like Amazon’s S3 service using Jungle Disk, may be your best option. Jungle Disk encrypts stored data, if you choose a service that doesn’t do so check out TrueCrypt for a great encryption solution.

Synching in the Cloud can be a security issue, especially if services don’t provide a way to encrypt the data when it’s on their servers or being transmitted to their servers. Numerous investigations by security experts (Google “Privacy and MobileMe”) indicate that MobileMe does not encrypt data while it is in transit. Use it on an unsecure connection like public wireless and your data can be snagged by anyone in the vicinity with basic hacking skills. Depending on what sort of information you’re synching this could be an issue -- your contacts, bookmarks and calendar? Likely not a big deal. Anything with passwords, financial data and other personally identifiable information that you’d prefer to be kept private shouldn’t ever be sent over wireless connections unencrypted, obviously.

None of this is rocket science. Wireless connections are notoriously insecure, corporations don’t always have our best interests in mind, governments make wacky laws, and logic tells us that having only one copy of any important data is tantamount to taunting the gods of technology. But practicing safe and sensible computing will go a long way in ensuring that your data is secured from technological traumas here on earth or in the Cloud.

No Internet? No Problem.

Michael Niemann — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:33:00 -0500

Say you’re on a cross-country flight and have to work on your document, but it’s stored on a server somewhere down on terra firma, and you, being airborne, are naturally offline. Even a year ago, this problem was the Achilles’ heel of Web-based apps: Without the Internet connection, they were useless. But things have changed. Today, being disconnected from the Net is no reason to leave your online apps behind.

ThinkFree mirrors its online apps with an offline version, which is part of the $49.95 ThinkFree Office 3 suite. All the work you do in the offline version is stored on your machine and then synchronized with your ThinkFree Online account when the computer is connected to the Net. You can set the sync directory and Auto Sync schedule in ThinkFree > Preferences, or sync manually by clicking the Sync button in the ThinkFree Manager window.

Google has developed an ingenious solution for Google Docs: Google Gears, an open source plug-in for Firefox that essentially turns the browser into an offline editor. Once installed, a Google Docs icon appears on your Desktop, and all your documents are only a double-click away. Any changes you make are saved to your Mac and synchronized with the Google Docs server as soon as an Internet connection is reestablished.

Zoho Writer piggybacks on Google’s solution and allows for offline editing by pointing Firefox to writer.zoho.com/offline, and presto, you are editing your document. Unfortunately, Zoho Show and Zoho Sheet don’t share this feature—your best bet for editing presentations or spreadsheets offline is to export a copy of your work to your Mac before you go, save it as a new version, and then upload that version when you’re back online. It’s a clunky workaround, but hey, this is work we’re talking about.

ThinkFree lets you work offline and then automatically or manually syncs your work back to the ThinkFree server the next time you’re on the Net.

Google Docs will prompt you to install the free Firefox plug-in Google Gears to take your work offline.

Zoho Writer can go offline if you’re using Firefox with Google Gears installed, but the Sheet and Show apps are online only.