Online document services

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Technology is analogous to a coin, it has two faces to it. Every little technology has a major story to tell us about its advantages and disadvantages. Especially in this era of innovation, witnessing advancements in technology have become as common as witnessing the sun rise everyday morning. What was popular yesterday is obsolete today and what is popular today will be obsolete tomorrow.

Web-based applications

Web-based application is one such technology that is taken the Internet with storm. Web-based applications are programs that run on Web servers and use Web pages as the user interface. These applications can be accessed at the same time my multiple-users. They use HTTP as its primary communications protocol and delivers web-based information in HTML

Examples of Web-based applications

   * E-Mail

   * Online Maps

   * Online Banking

   * Instant Messaging

   * Online Reservation

   * Online Document Services and many more …

These applications are most commonly used in the day-day life of many internet users.

What is online document service?

Online document service (ODS) offers the user with the ability to store, read, write and share their word documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. These documents are available anywhere and anytime to the user where he/she can access Internet.

Online document services act as collaborative tools, much like the way Wiki's do. But it is important to understand that both of them deserve a separate categorization, beyond their both being services in convergence of communications. Some of the points of distinction are:

• The main principle behind ODS is not authorship.
• An ODS involves editing contents of a document as opposed to editing the contents of a website.
• The primary purpose of an ODS is not to act as a knowledge repository or an encyclopaedia.
• An ODS has moderated collaboration.

Advantages of Online Document Service

Online document service have the following advantages when compared to the already available off-line document service providers (products):

• No software installation
• Operating System independent
• No ongoing or upfront expenses
• No up-grading(software) hazels
• No special hardware requirements
• Concurrent editing
• Ease of sharing

Online Document Service Providers

• Zoho
• Google Docs
• ThinkFree Online
• Adobe Buzzword

History

Oct, 2003 A small company in Cupertino, created ThinkFree, an office suite that is tightly linked with an online file storage service called CyberdrivePlus.

Jun, 2005 Adobe made its name on the Web by created a Web-based word processor application that called Buzzword.

Aug, 2005 Upstartle, a software company launched Writely, a web-based word processor.

Sep, 2005 AdventNet, a company focusing on building affordable software for businesses, launched Zoho.

Mar, 2006 Google announced that it had acquired Upstartle.

Jun, 2006 Google launched Spreadsheets.

Feb, 2007 Google Docs was made available to Google Apps users.

Mar, 2008 Zoho announced that Zoho Writer supports both online and offline access from Internet Explorer Mobile (IE Mobile).

Features

• Users can create, import and export documents.
• Users can publish their work as a webpage.
• Users can share and edit documents by inviting collaborators.
• The web-application keeps a record of recent changes made to a document by collaborators.
• The changes made to the document are visible in real-time.
• Owner can exercise access control by assigning permissions to collaborators.

Comparison of Features

Features	Zoho	Google Docs	ThinkFree Online	Adobe Buzzword
Invite collaborators	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Storage Space	1GB of storage	Unlimited Storage	1GB of storage	Unlimited Storage
File Size	10MB	500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image	4MB	10MB
Services Offered	Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations	Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations	Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations	Docs
Spell Check	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Fonts	19	11	134	7
Word Count	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Insert International Characters	Yes, only Roman alphabets	Yes, only Roman alphabets	Yes, Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Korean alphabets	No
Development Platform	Ajax	Ajax	Java, Ajax	Flash
Access documents on mobile devices	Yes	No	Yes	No
Desktop Version	No	No	Yes	Yes

Version control

Most of the times when you are editing a document, it goes through various revisions over a period of time. What if after numerous edits and saves, one day your mind reverts and you want to go back to the older version. Version control saves you the hassle of going back to square one and having to rewrite it all over again.

Version Control is an integral part of ODS. Changes to each document are usually identified by incrementing an associated number, called the revision number. Either simply increment numbers for each edit (v1,v2,v3, etc.) or denote major/minor revision number ((v1_0, v1_1, v1_2, v1_3, v2_0, etc.) or include dates ((v2008-07-01, v2008-07-14, etc. )

There are various version control methods : SCCS( source code control system), RCS(revision control system), CVS(concurrent versions system) , SVN(subversion), Perforce etc.

Each ODS has its own version control method. For example, Perforce is the version control system in use at Google.

Disadvantages

• Most of the ODS providers restrict the the file size and storage space.
• Some providers have some bugs in their import and export file functions.
• Due to network security concern, users will not edit their secret or proprietary files with ODS.

Future Development

We can anticipate the following enhancements to be available to the online document service users

• Support for international characters such as Chinese, Japanese and so on.
• Support for various mobile platform.
• Support for more document types, such as Visio.
• Support for Speech recognition.

Competition

See Google_docs_vs._MS_word