Anyone heard of this? The idea is everything office can do as a web app. Now at first it sounds crazy. But I have been thinking about it. We have all seen rich text editors now on the net. Hell if you have gmail you have seen it. Excel or a spead sheet can be done with tables and some ajax mixed with some DHTML. PDFs can be created on the fly. For presentations or Power point you can create swf's and images on the fly with PHP. Access you have a variety of databases to choose from. Visio can be done with vector graphics/swf. Outlook can be replaced with any number of apps or just web based mail.

Looking at it... One could stand to make some bucks off this. Just think. $399 for office X vs $5 per month from http://you_company.myoffice.com

The person running this would need an [censored] load of storage as I see it taking off in a big way. You could allways I guess have users store documents localy, but that takes away from one of the benifits. Store and access anywhere.


Maybe,

$5 x hrs access to office products store loacaly
$15.95 x hrs access and x mb storage on server
$25.95 unlimited hrs and X mb storage on server
$35.95 unlimited hrs and X gb storage on server
$55.95 unlimited hrs and xxgb storage on server
$99.95 unlimited access and 1 tb storage on server


Thoughts?

I think its an awesome idea and the market is there. It can be marketed to every new startup business out there. Although I expect the licensing fees for the software could get tricky or at least expensive.

I'll betcha Google is already all over this...

Sounds incredible... Could be done relatively easily, but your pricing would also have to reflect xx users for more proffitability (so many users have access, blah blah); I think that it could be relatively easy to do... Especially as most of the scripts you'd be dealing with would be Home Brewed or Freeware...

On a side note, your "Web Outlook" could just be a web based email that uses IMAP such as SquirrelMail, and then have it so that certain account levels have POP3/IMAP support through 3rd party applications...

Could be an interesting project to say the least.... For someone with time and inclination :scuffs feet:

Actualy they just came out and said they are NOT doing it. The idea has Microsoft jumping through hoops. On DSL reports there have been several disscussions about it. I am looking at it and even I see it would not be too hard to do. I mean there is a ton of code to write... But all the tools are in place.

Thanks for the idea, I might actually try something like this. Seriously.

Ajax is [censored] sweet, and Rails makes it easy and fun..

Some good places:
Article: Ajax on Rails
Ajax on Rails
Google Search: Ajax Rails

Glad to see someone else thinks Ajax is good stuff too. I have been talking about it for months with no feed back.

If you love ajax so much why don't you marry it? :p


�int�� & Ajax sitting in a tree...

/me runs away crying(but secretly hoping Ajax will love me too)

Near as I can figure never coding line one on a project like this Power point will be the hardest and most esintial to make it marketable. Verizon uses power point for every presentation. Many companies do because it makes for nice way to dissplay ideas. Flash on the fly use to creat presentations....


So far it would be feasable to have

Word processor
Spead Sheet
Presentations
PDF writer
email client
Viso/type app

I was thinking, you can sell this so many ways.

1.) write license
2.) Read license
3.) By app
4.) By Group of apps
5.) Yaerly fee
6.) Monthly fee
7.) storage space for files
8.) Bandwidth


I mean you can slice up soooo many packages.


I was also thinking. Basicaly once a word processor file is done it is basicaly a web page. But you need a way to make it appear as one file and not like a web page made up of 5+ files.

So you would need a fake/virtual file system too. This way they can pull up what is saved. Now save to local PC would be tricky.

You may want to make it so that it has seperate passwords for read/write/export as well... Additonally building "master" passwords is a nessessary for "admin's" from each company...

For a relly good RTE(Rich text editor)

http://fieldspar.com

It has it all.

anyone making any progress?

been busy with baby and vps config's and migrations; haven't given it a second thought; a paying gig is more important than a freeware one ...

I did however find a badass excel looking javascript somewhere, but i nuked the bookmark...

This is close though:
http://www.blueshoes.org/en/javascript/spreadsheet/

http://trimpath.com/demos/test1/trimpath/spreadsheet_blank.html

This one has some features that make it more like a desktop app that I like, resizeable colums and rows. It loads faster and seems a bit more responsive. it is however missing a few of the features the one you posted has.

Humm, if only we knew javascript lol...

Ya know, i made a big post last night, doesn't seem it stuck though; perhaps i timed out or something...

to begin, there are several great web apps similar to office. i still have yet to see a suite though.

ms is not behind in this technology. i believe they are much closer than we think. sharepoint? shared workspace in outlook?

ms is ahead and safe for a few reasons:

ms has the large chunk of market
there is a learbibg curve to new software, let alone webapps with how they are now.

more popular may be something similar to weboffice on sharepoint server. local to intranet, so not subjected too net downtime. can you imagine losing that much productivity when your inet connection goes down, or worse your weboffice host?

ms can always fall back on their normal office suite too.

i wish there was a market here, but ms will be ready and willing to monopolize it before the tech is tested enough for widescale commercial use.

True, but hey, we could develop it for an enterprise class market for their clients, immagine; a central server for keeping items for all of your employees; possibly build a redundant system that will sync any number of "hubs" nightly (keeping the most recently updated document in each db)...

And best of all, we market it as a "you host" thing, Zend encoded or something; then we're not responsible for hosting lol... Then we could sell keys and have it a "you have so many users" type of option; have it so if user db has more than $keylimit it errors out until rectified...

MS is behind in what I intend to do for a few reasons. #1 there is a movement to get away from MS. Now this may die with the release of long horn but I doubt it. Many of the features people were excited about have been scraped just like last time, or the time before, or the time before that, oh wait that was windows ME. People are tired of the Microsoft song and dance.

Instead of a expensive upgrade every year you pay a minimal monthly fee. Imagine $5 per user for a year. That is $60 verses $380 per machine till next years office is out. Even if it is 2 or 3 years $5 per month is still cost effective.

All files are backward compatable to previous versions with the web suit. Upgrades are transparent to the user. They no longer have to worry about upgrading. We do it on the server and they are on the new version.

Inet connections going down for compaines is not that common these days. Most have a back up line now. I know I deal with them all daya every day.

A customer/busines might have a T-1 to each location via Frame Relay for thier WAN. One of the PVC's(Permanet virtual connections) terminates at an ISP such as VNI(Verizon Network Integration) this puts them on the net. Most additionaly also have ISDN back-ups. Now ISDN is expensive as you are paying per minute, but they are still productive.

Now true TCP/IP is a best effort service. But given time and money we could set up ATM VPI/VCI's to major customers. This is guarenteed service. Even better is SES/TLS fiber connections to thier network with Vlan ID's. This is very secure and reliable. You can get a TLS line now for cheaper than a Frame Relay line.

The fact I plan to use Ajax, DHTML, "javascript", my service will be better than what MS comes out with. Thier [censored] js lang is not as far along as javascript. I am not even sure you can use it with ajax. Ajax takes the web app and gives it desktop abilities. Real time page updates without refresh.

It has not been till the last year or 2 that this could be pulled off. But It really can now. The speadsheet with take MUCH creative coding and needs to be on level with the desktop app. This will be most tricky I feel. It can be done in such a way as to be just as good as the desktop app as far as 90% of end users are concerned.

When office 2003 came out MS took a hit because not many upgraded. They could not see the reason to do so. We could make it compatable with MS files as well. I think they use something like MSOXML or MSXML for thier formaiting.

IMHO Office 2003 is just Office XP with a new GUI and Publisher bundled...