Small Office 2.0 vendors ally to fight Microsoft, Google threats

Computerworld - A nascent alliance of "Office 2.0" vendors yesterday proposed a set of Web programming standards for interoperability in a bid to attract Microsoft Office users and fend off larger competitors with suite ambitions such as Google Inc.

By adhering to a set of technical guidelines for creating AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) "mashups," firms creating online word processors, spreadsheets, contact managers and other similar applications will be able to offer a single log-in process, easy file sharing and rich and accurate copying and pasting of data. All of those functions would work among multiple services, according to executives at iNetOffice Inc. and ShareMethods LLC, the two firms behind yesterday's move.

"We want to avoid having lots of applications that are islands unto themselves," said Eric Hoffert, CEO of South Orange, N.J.-based ShareMethods, an online provider of document management and collaboration services.

The announcement and demonstration coincides with the Office 2.0 conference being held in San Francisco yesterday and today.

Today, there are more than 100 Office 2.0 services hosted on the Internet. The services are inexpensive or free for now and claim to replicate most of the essential features of an Office component -- whether it be Word, Excel, PowerPoint or something else -- while adding the ability for multiple users to edit a document at the same time. That feature that has historically been cumbersome or expensive to deploy in Microsoft Office.

But none of the services yet offers the breadth of Microsoft's Office suite -- not even Google, which announced yesterday that it is combining its online word processor and spreadsheet onto a single platform.

That means users who want to transfer data or documents would sometimes have to log-in to multiple services and download and then re-upload a file -- running the risk that the file might not even open up properly.

That inconvenience can be streamlined if Office 2.0 services follow the 15 proposed guidelines for Simple Ajax Mashups (SAM), said Tom Snyder, president of Kirkland, Wa.-based iNetOffice. "Every time you've eliminated one or two clicks, you've made someone more productive," he said.

SAM combines several existing open standards, including WebDAV (Web Document Authoring and Versioning), SSO (single sign-on) and ALE (AJAX Linking and Embedding).

One firm that is already retooling its online application to adhere to the SAM standards is Taliferro Inc., a Surfside, Fla.-based provider of what it calls online activity management software. "We want to offer the same things that all of the big companies offer," said Ty Showers, principal software architect at Taliferro. "It's not going to be hard to implement, if you're used to building AJAX applications."