Why Twitter will change the way business communicates

By: Robert Scoble

Hard to believe that only 10 or 15 years ago we interacted with coworkers and colleagues with memos and phone calls. Email and instant messaging changed all that. Now there’s a new communications revolution coming. These services mix contacts, instant messaging, blogging, and texting, and they’re poised to make email feel as antiquated as the mimeograph.

The best known of the new services is Twitter. Since its debut last spring, it has been one of the fastest-growing apps in the history of the Internet. The best way to describe it is as a microblog service in which you tell people what you’re doing or thinking at any given moment. The hook is that you’re limited to 140 characters. “It’s strangely addictive,” says NBC videographer Jim Long. “Evidently, people are interested in what I’m doing, and I genuinely care about what they’re doing.”

Twitter’s basic idea has proven so popular that others have copied its premise and added features. Jaiku lets me include blog posts, my link blog, and more along with my mini posts. Pownce users can send files to one another, as well as calendar events. At Facebook, I can add such information as my favorite music and the syndicated Web feeds I’ve shared in Google Reader.

All this adds up to a new way to share information about yourself. Although the content of the messages can vary wildly from voyeuristically interesting to terribly dull, a frequent stream of updates can strengthen your brand. My 4,000-plus Twitter “followers” can get my blasts online or via text message, and each one is also its own Web page, which means that Google can see it and let people search for it. When you’re traveling frequently and working from coffeehouses or the backseat of a cab, these services are great to keep in touch with coworkers back at the office and with customers nearby. “I post where I travel and arrange user meetups,” says Betsy Weber, an evangelist with software firm TechSmith.

The professional intimacy these services create–hey, if you know someone’s whereabouts and musical tastes, you’re halfway home–can also win you clients. “People won’t do business with you until they like you or have a sense of trust,” says Cathryn Hrudicka, a consultant who uses Facebook, Jaiku, and Twitter. She has already gotten referrals from people she has met online because she has shown she’ll be available when clients need her.

Sales and marketing are lagging in seeing the potential here. When I used all these services to tell the world that my wife and I were expecting a child in September, I anticipated hearing from the world’s largest consumer-products companies begging me to try their latest diapers, food, car seats, and financial instruments. What came back? Nothing. Where was Procter & Gamble? Given what it and other companies spend acquiring new customers, there’s an untapped gold mine in Twitter and Facebook because we’re volunteering so much information about what we’re doing right now, whether it’s working on a project or eating a chicken-salad sandwich. Learning how to tap it correctly–both to sell to me directly and in seeing major trends in the millions of daily public posts–will be the next major challenge for these companies.

If we revisit this conversation again in three years, I suspect that we’ll have found all sorts of little uses for these services, and they’ll simply become what email is today: something we must do just to participate in the heartbeat of business.

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Web Marketing to a Segment Too Big to Be a Niche

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

ALTHOUGH 50 million people in the United States have some form of physical or mental disability, they spend money just as easily as others. But there are few efficient ways for advertisers to reach them, and that’s what a new Web site, Disaboom.com, hopes to change.

Disaboom is the brainchild of J. Glen House, who graduated from medical school after becoming a quadriplegic as a result of a skiing accident at 20. The site combines the social-networking features of Web sites like Facebook with information of interest to its constituency: medical news, career advice, dating resources and travel tips.

Disaboom.com went live Oct. 1 and hopes to attract more than a million unique visitors each month by the end of February and to double that over the next year. Mr. House and his investors took the company public in May, listing it on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board securities market.

“I don’t think mainstream advertisers realize the magnitude of the marketplace and how underserved it was,” said Howard Lieber, vice president for sales at Disaboom.

Among some advertisers who have already signed contracts with Disaboom are Netflix, Johnson & Johnson, Avis and Cricket Communications.

“I didn’t have to think real long and hard about it,” said Kathy LaPointe, mobility motoring manager at the Ford Motor Company, about the automaker’s decision to advertise prominently on the site. Ford is highlighting its $1,000 allowance for new car buyers to defray costs of adding adaptive equipment like wheelchair or scooter lifts, steering wheel knobs and pedal extensions.

Click-throughs from the ads to Ford’s Web site “have performed well above the benchmark,” Ms. LaPointe said. “This has been a huge success for us so far.”

To Ms. LaPointe, this is part advertising outlay and part public service.

“We’re in the business to make money and sell vehicles, but it’s also the right thing to do,” she said. “We can’t even measure the societal benefit” of the effort, she added. “We’re trying to make a difference in the world and help people.”

Marketing to people with disabilities may look great on paper, but it is not easy.

“We’re a very difficult group to reach,” said Eric Lipp, founder of the Open Doors Organization, a nonprofit group that consults with companies about the disability market. “People in the marketing world will say, ‘I can reach out to them,’ and I’m just telling you it’s not easy. We’re just spread out over all kinds of walks of life — from different races to different religions to different income levels and education.”

Still, Mr. Lipp, who has spoken with Disaboom representatives and plans to write articles for the site, said he was optimistic about the venture. “We would like to see something like this work,” he said. “You just have to build the right mouse trap.”

Disaboom paid DATA Inc., a computer design firm based in Denver, $280,000 to design the site, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. It also recently acquired lovebyrd.com, a dating Web site for people with disabilities, which Disaboom is folding into its own site. At the end of June, the company listed $2.2 million in cash.

“I think they’re right to get a big war chest of money,” Mr. Lipp said. “Now it’s about reaching out to the community.”

One person the site has contacted is Andrew J. Imparato, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, which has 180,000 members. Disaboom has sponsored a mentoring event for the group and is trying to sign up all of the association’s members; in turn, Mr. Imparato hopes that people who are not members of his group will learn about it through Disaboom and join.

Mr. Imparato said Disaboom could serve as an important clearinghouse for people with disabilities, organizing them to make their voice resound more clearly with business and government.

“The disability community to a large degree is trying to get more visibility as a desirable constituency, whether you’re talking about customers with money in their pockets, or a talent pool to hire from, or voters,” Mr. Imparato said. “To a large degree, we feel like we’re invisible as a market and a political constituency.”

The number of adults with some form of disability is by all accounts growing, in part because the population is aging. Disability rates among older people are substantially higher, greater than 40 percent of the population 65 and over, compared with 19 percent of those between 16 and 64, according to census data.

The portion of the population with a disability will rise from one in five today to nearly one in four by 2030, according to Open Doors.

“They call us T.A.B.’s — the temporarily able-bodied,” said Mr. Lieber, who does not have a disability. “If you live long enough, you will get some physical limitation. You will eventually experience some of what these people are experiencing right now.”

People with mobility challenges are active consumers. A 2005 Harris Interactive study commissioned by Open Doors found that 69 percent of adults with disabilities — more than 21 million people — had traveled for either business or pleasure at least once in the preceding two years. In that same period, more than half had stayed in hotels, while 31 percent had booked at least one flight and 20 percent had rented a car. More than 75 percent of people with disabilities dine out at least once a week.

There are few media outlets that specifically aim at the disabled population, but advertisers like McDonald’s, Verizon Wireless, Sears and Honda have featured people with disabilities in their mainstream advertising. Target features disabled models in sales circulars; Kohl’s department stores use mannequins in wheelchairs in store displays.

Although some of these efforts may prompt accusations of political correctness, advocates for people with disabilities say they welcome the current crop of ads — which tend to feature people with disabilities prosaically in group situations — over the bromide-filled narratives about overcoming adversity that characterized earlier efforts.

“If you’re watching a commercial for a bank or a wireless phone carrier and you see someone in a wheelchair who is just part of the scene or background, it helps create a message that people with handicaps are integrated in society,” said Mr. Imparato, of the American Association of People With Disabilities. “Part of what that does is it normalizes having a disability.”

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IMThere Joins MadeIt As The Most Recent Attempts To Crack The Event Nut

and the deadpooled Any event based site is basically a social network – they are designed to allow interaction among friends to coordinate virtual or real world activities. The venerable Evite is still the king of online event coordination. None of the recent startups (renkoo, socializr, mypunchbowlSkobee) have presented much of a challenge. And none of the event aggregators/search engines, including upcoming, zvents or eventful, have managed to dominate their space, either.So there’s still room for the killer event site, and startups keep trying. A couple of weeks ago TechCrunch wrote about MadeIt, a new site that not only allows users to create new events but also to add content before and after. Like the others, though, it centers on the invitation to an event and whether you are going or not.

St. Louis based IMThere, which I discovered on TechnicallySpeaking, is a little different, and joins MadeIt as the most recent startups to try to crack the event nut. IMThere is focused less on getting invitations to events out to friends and talking them into accepting. Instead, it allows users to upload events, focusing less on the private invitation stuff (parties, dinners, etc.). Instead, the site’s early content is mostly about public events like concerts, video game releases, TV premiers, movie releases, etc.

Other users can then add their own content, ranging from comments about the event to uploading pictures from mobile phones during the event itself.

The resulting content is more interesting to the public than those private dinner parties. And top level navigation allows browsing by person, venue, artist, etc. So you can see all the events your friends participated in, see all the past and future concerts at a local venue, and see all past and future album releases and concerts by a particular artist. Users can also search events by popularity, region, etc.

The result seems to be a compelling user experience that could result in real local communities springing up and interacting around stuff that’s happening around them. Mobile interaction is excellent, so heavy users will be accessing it from all of their devices regularly.

There’s no guarantee IMThere won’t be in the deadpool in six months, but if they can quickly grow a core set of passionate users, they could have a nice property on their hands. IMThere is the first project from parent company Ramped Media.

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Other e-vents sites:

In India, Poverty Inspires Technology Workers to Altruism

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, in India workmen like Mr. Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients’ computers.

So you can imagine Mr. Manohar’s wonder as he sat in a swiveling chair in front of a computer, dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Mr. Manohar’s page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on an Indian Web site called Babajob.com.

Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers — the world’s poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

“In Redmond, you don’t see 7-year-olds begging on the street,” said Sean Blagsvedt, Babajob’s founder, referring to Microsoft’s headquarters in Washington State, where he once worked. “In India, you can’t escape the feeling that you’re really lucky. So you ask, What are you going to do about all the stuff around you? How are you going to use all these skills?”

Perhaps for less altruistic reasons, but often with positive results for the poor, corporations have made India a laboratory for extending modern technological conveniences to those long deprived. Nokia, for instance, develops many of its ultralow-cost cellphones here. Citibank first experimented here with a special A.T.M. that recognizes thumbprints — to help slum dwellers who struggle with PINs. And Microsoft has made India one of the major centers of its global research group studying technologies for the poor, like software that reads to illiterate computer users. Babajob is a quintessential example of how the back-office operations in India have spawned poverty-inspired innovation.

The best-known networking sites in the industry connect computer-savvy elites to one another. Babajob, by contrast, connects India’s elites to the poor at their doorsteps, people who need jobs but lack the connections to find them. Job seekers advertise skills, employers advertise jobs and matches are made through social networks.

For example, if Rajeev and Sanjay are friends, and Sanjay needs a chauffeur, he can view Rajeev’s page, travel to the page of Rajeev’s chauffeur and see which of the chauffeur’s friends are looking for similar work.

Mr. Blagsvedt, now 31, joined Microsoft in Redmond in 1999. Three years ago he was sent to India to help build the local office of Microsoft Research, the company’s in-house policy research arm. The new team worked on many of the same complex problems as their peers in Redmond, but the employees here led very different lives outside the office than their counterparts in Redmond. They had servants and laborers. They read constant newspaper tales of undernourishment and illiteracy.

The company’s Indian employees were not seeing poverty for the first time, but they were now equipped with first-rate computing skills, and many felt newly empowered to help their society.

At the same time, Microsoft was plagued by widespread software piracy, which limited its revenue in India. Among other things, the company looked at low-income consumers as a vast and unexploited commercial opportunity, so it encouraged its engineers’ philanthropic urges.

Poverty became a major focus in Mr. Blagsvedt’s research office. Anthropologists and sociologists were hired to explain things like the effect of the caste system on rural computer usage. In the course of that work, Mr. Blagsvedt stumbled upon an insight by a Duke University economist, Anirudh Krishna.

Mr. Krishna found that many poor Indians in dead-end jobs remain in poverty not because there are no better jobs, but because they lack the connections to find them. Any Bangalorean could confirm the observation: the city teems with laborers desperate for work, and yet wealthy software tycoons complain endlessly about a shortage of maids and cooks.

Mr. Blagsvedt’s epiphany? “We need village LinkedIn!” he recalled saying, alluding to the professional networking site.

He quit Microsoft and, with his stepfather, Ira Weise, and a former Microsoft colleague built a social-networking site to connect Bangalore’s yuppies with its laborers. (The site, which Mr. Blagsvedt started this summer and runs out of his home, focuses on Bangalore now, but he plans to spread it to other Indian cities and maybe globally.)

Building a site meant to reach laborers earning $2 to $3 a day presented special challenges. The workers would be unfamiliar with computers. The wealthy potential employers would be reluctant to let random applicants tend their gardens or their newborns. To deal with the connectivity problem, Babajob pays anyone, from charities to Internet cafe owners, who finds job seekers and registers them online. (Babajob earns its keep from employers’ advertisements, diverting a portion of that to those who register job seekers.) And instead of creating an anonymous job bazaar, Babajob replicates online the process by which Indians hire in real life: through chains of personal connections.

In India, a businessman looking for a chauffeur might ask his friend, who might ask his chauffeur. Such connections provide a kind of quality control. The friend’s chauffeur, for instance, will not recommend a hoodlum, for fear of losing his own job.

To re-create this dynamic online, Babajob pays people to be “connectors” between employer and employee. In the example above, the businessman’s friend and his chauffeur would each earn the equivalent of $2.50 if they connected the businessman with someone he liked.

The model is gaining attention, and praise. A Bangalore venture capitalist, when told of Babajob, immediately asked to be put in touch with Mr. Blagsvedt. And Steve Pogorzelski, president of the international division of Monster.com, the American jobs site, said, “Wow” when told of the company. “It is an important innovation because it opens up the marketplace to people of socioeconomic levels who may not have the widest array of jobs available to them.”

Mr. Krishna, the Duke economist, called it a “very significant innovation,” but he cautioned that the very poor might not belong to the social networks that would bring them to Babajob, even on the periphery.

In its first few months, the company has drummed up job seekers on its own, sending workers into the streets with fliers promising employment.

To find potential employers, in addition to counting on word of mouth among those desperate for maids and laborers, Babajob is also relying on Babalife, the company’s parallel social networking site for the yuppie elite. People listed on Babalife will automatically be on Babajob, too.

So far, more than 2,000 job seekers have registered. The listings are a portrait of India’s floating underclass, millions and millions seeking a few dollars a day to work as chauffeurs, nannies, gardeners, guards and receptionists.

A woman named Selvi Venkatesh was a typical job seeker. “I am really in need of a job as our residential building collapsed last month in Ejipura,” she said, referring to a building collapse that killed two people, including an infant, in late July, according to The Times of India.

In Mr. Blagsvedt’s apartment one morning, Mr. Manohar, the painter, professed hope.

He earns $100 a month. Jobs come irregularly, so he often spends up to three months of the year idle. Between jobs, he borrows from loan sharks to feed his wife and children. The usurers levy 10 percent monthly interest, enough to make a $100 loan a $314 debt in one year.

Mr. Manohar does not want his children to know his worries, or his life. He wants them to work in a nice office, so he spends nearly half his income on private schools for them. That is why he was at Babajob in a swiveling chair, staring at a computer and dreaming of more work.

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Social networking sites are called ‘better than print’ for recruiting IT staff

By Leo King

Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites have become the top tool for hiring IT staff, a new survey among recruitment companies reveals.

According to 58 percent of IT recruitment firms polled by the Association of Technology Staffing Companies, an industry body, such sites are more useful in finding staff than traditional print advertisements. And 49 percent said they were now more effective than internet banner advertising.

But seven in 10 recruiters said job boards provided a better quality of candidates, and two in 10 preferred cold calling. Only 9 percent saw social networking as providing the most appropriate candidates.

Atsco said that the headhunters were favoring special interest groups on the sites to find candidates with the right background and knowledge, over the “scatter gun” approach of finding the right people through print advertising. It admitted, however, that print and online recruitment advertising would remain an important way for employers and recruiters to build brand value and target senior level appointments.

Ann Swain, chief executive at Atsco, said the success of social networking sites as a recruitment tool was a result of their being interactive, as opposed to the one-way communication of print advertisements. She said they offered “a dynamic, two-way dialogue between recruiter and candidate” rather than “another passive form of advertising.”

“Social networking sites make it very easy for recruiters to become trusted advisers to candidates and genuinely get to know them,” she added. “Candidates often reveal far more about themselves on these sites than they would do on the phone or in interview.”

But the survey also revealed that recruitment firms were risking their valuable databases online. Only a quarter of staffing companies currently write restrictive clauses into consultants’ contracts, asserting ownership of databases and contact lists constructed by staff on social networking sites.

As “the lifeblood of the recruitment industry,” these databases needed much more security, Atsco said.

“This is currently an area where contract law is lagging behind social trends and an area of risk that the recruitment industry needs to pick up on,” Swain said.

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RightNow, Demandware Mash Up CRM, E-Commerce

RightNow and Demandware have developed a new mash-up that integrates the former’s CRM and customer service offerings with the latter’s e-commerce suite.

The result is an application that incorporates product content management and promotion with such interaction functionality as click-to-chat, while marrying order-tracking and management functions to the agent desktop.

Specifically, the new application connects RightNow’s service, marketing and sales applications with Demandware’s Web platform and e-commerce services.

RightNow’s contributions to the mash-up are its inbound and outbound sales and service desktop, multichannel customer service, marketing communications and customer feedback capabilities.

Demandware is providing its online storefront, site search, guided navigation, product catalog and promotions, Web development environment, user profiles and online content.

Suite Approach

On one hand, this mash-up can be viewed as a shortcut to bringing a suite application to market, as it eliminates much of the work involved in developing one from the ground up.

However, it is a mistake to assume that RightNow or Demandware have joined forces in such a manner strictly for competitive reasons, Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone told CRM Buyer — specifically with a vendor like NetSuite, the top online suite provider offering deep CRM functionality.

“RightNow rarely goes up against NetSuite in deals,” Kingstone said. “Also, RightNow’s target audience is larger than NetSuite’s.”

Rather, the larger point behind the mash-up is that it is emblematic of RightNow’s MO of automating integration around the customer experience.

The territory that Demandware owns — namely the order management process — is a critical integration point that RightNow has thus far not touched.

“Unfortunately, it is only offering this integration for the Demandware customer base,” Kingstone said.

Integrating the Online Channel

Later this year, the two companies plan to cross-sell and upsell the joint application to their respective installed bases, Scott Todaro, director of product and industry marketing at Demandware, told CRM Buyer. There is little overlap among the two firms’ clients.

There are no concrete plans, however, to embed the joint functionality in future releases of the respective applications. It may be, though, that the mash-up is enough to satisfy users’ needs — at least in the immediate term.

The driver behind the joint application is the growing necessity of integrating the online channel into back-office functions, explained David Hayden, director of product strategy for RightNow. That’s especially relevant as more companies rip out their legacy systems and replace them with SOA (service-oriented architecture)-based applications.

Vendors and their customers alike, Hayden told CRM Buyer, “are really looking to connect the various business units around solid, go-to-market strategies.”

Kingstone echoed that prediction — at least in terms of the mash-up service providing a faster time-to-market vehicle.

“The future of software will focus on mash-ups like these,” she said. “At bottom, they are all about breaking down the barrier posed by integration.”

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Google Vs. Zoho: Can Either Replace Microsoft Office?

By Serdar Yegulalp, Barbara Krasnoff

The gold standard for office productivity has become Microsoft Office — a suite of applications used by most of us in our day-to-day business and personal activities. While there have been a number of commercial (Corel WordPerfect Office) and free (OpenOffice.org) alternatives available, it’s the new online applications that have been causing the most talk — and, possibly, offering the most promise.

Until recently, the idea of online applications replacing locally-installed software was, to say the least, impractical. In fact, before a majority of computer users were on broadband connections, it would have been completely useless: if you’re only online a few hours a day you can’t confine your word processing and spreadsheet activity to those hours.

That has changed in the last few years. Most of us are online most of the time — certainly, we have continuous access to the Internet at work and at home. As a result, using an online word processor or calendar app sounds a lot less ridiculous than it did before. And there are some things current software applications do rather badly (such as sharing files for collaborative work) that online apps are a lot better at.

The idea of committing to a Web connection for your basic tasks is still a tricky one, though. While the Internet may be ubiquitous in homes and offices, getting online from your commuter train or while you wait for your kid to finish dance class is problematic at best. In addition, glitches in broadband service, especially in remote areas that depend on satellite service, are common enough that the likelihood of even temporary loss of access to a word processor or spreadsheet can make many of us a bit nervous. But if you’re willing to take the risk, two Web services have taken the lead in offering online applications that have the potential to, one day, knock Microsoft Office off its pedestal.

But can Google and/or Zoho really challenge something as entrenched in the marketplace as Microsoft Office? In the following pages, we compare each of these online contenders to the leader of the pack by matching them up to six of Microsoft Office’s applications: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Access. (Note: There is currently no database application such as Access in Google.) How do Google and Zoho rate? Is it time to switch, or are the two online services still second-raters when compared to Microsoft’s established frontrunners? Read on, and see what you think.

Introducing: Google

Google, which has joined Microsoft and Apple as a contender for “tech company most likely to take over the world,” has been slowly buying up interesting online applications and integrating them into its own line of advertising-supported products. It has accumulated a wide range of applications: word processing, e-mail, photo album, simple Web site developer, blogging application, and so on.

However, while there is a great deal of value in the variety, there is little to no attempt to organize them into a cohesive whole. The nearest that Google comes to this is in its Google Docs application, which combines a word processor, spreadsheet app, and presentation package. Calendar and Gmail, apps you’d normally expect to be part of a productivity suite, are totally separate. You can use Google’s home page, iGoogle, to organize some of these onto the same page, but it’s not quite as efficient a method as that used by, yes, Microsoft.

Introducing: Zoho

Zoho’s motto is “Work. Online” and its aim is to provide you with portable replacements for many of the programs you expect to find installed on a desktop PC. The analogy the folks at Zoho use is a desk phone vs. a mobile phone: the fact that you can take your cell phone nearly anywhere (as long as there’s service) gives it possibilities a regular phone doesn’t have.

Despite Zoho being new to the game, it’s been adding applications and features to its online office suite with persistent regularity; for example, it recently added e-mail to its feature set. Zoho even has some applications, such as its Creator database, that many hard drive-based packages do not.There’s no question about it: Zoho is obviously serious in its bid to offer people at least some of Office’s functionality without the price, and with the added bonus of being able to work anywhere that there’s a Web browser and an Internet connection.

Replacing Microsoft Word: Zoho Writer

Writer, Zoho’s word processor, has been designed to sport roughly the same level of functionality as “classic” Word (Word 97 through 2003). It offers the same clutch of frequently used features that also turn up in programs like AbiWord or OpenOffice.org. The editing features are nowhere near what they ought to be compared to even low-end Word clones on the desktop, but Writer balances its shortcomings with some collaborative features that are interesting and potentially useful.

At first glance, Writer looks and behaves like it should: a word processor, emulated via a Web browser’s interface, with most of the controls behaving as you might expect. Copying and pasting text from existing Word documents preserves a lot of its formatting, but you’ll probably want to use the Import function to bring in existing .doc files. If you want to convert documents en masse, you can e-mail them to an address specially generated for your Zoho account and wait for them to show up in the My Docs panel on the left-hand side of the screen. Documents can also be imported from a URL, though when I imported an HTML document from my site some of the images inexplicably showed up broken.

While Writer works for casual use, I found that many things I would take for granted in a full word processor are simply not there. Page headers and footers, for instance, cannot be edited at all; documents have an automatic “Page x of y” footer inserted on each page. There’s no equation editor, either, so anyone doing scientific or technical work will be stymied (although I suspect they’d already have spent the money for a desktop suite instead of using a service like Zoho). Printing, likewise, is limited to the way the browser itself handles print jobs. When I tried to print a simple document, I got extraneous headers and footers supplied by the browser itself.

Writer seems to work best as a text editor rather than a full-featured word processor, since the formatting and construction of documents is limited by what’s possible in a Web browser. Sometimes this shows up in unexpected ways: One page I imported included some JavaScript that caused images to zoom to full size when clicked, and the scripting was still able to run while the page was in the editor. I worried about what possible effects retaining such functions might have on the program at large.

I also kept running into the rough edges of what is still essentially an alpha product. Image handling seems to be very spotty. I sometimes couldn’t edit the attributes of imported images, and the only real image-editing option possible with an inserted picture is to resize it. Your best bet is to make sure whatever images you’re working with are as finished as they can be before you upload them.

The collaborative features, though, are what make the program truly useful. A document can be published, which allows other people to submit comments on it, or you can share documents with specific people, essentially sending them an e-mail inviting them to work on it with you. Shared documents can be read-only or marked as read-write to allow others to make changes. It’s a lot cheaper than setting up a document server for Microsoft Office — but at the same time, you have to keep in mind the constraints of the program. I liked the export-to-PDF function — probably the best way to preserve document formatting — except when the export function inexplicably yielded up a blank file.

Replacing Microsoft Word: Google Docs

When Google bought the online word processor Writely in 2006, the app was already attracting attention. It’s been substantially tweaked since then, but it remains a very useful tool. You want to do some quick word processing for your blog? Perfect. You want to write a letter and share it with your family? Absolutely. You want to construct a formal report with headers, footnotes, and other interesting formatting? Time to go back to Word.

Google’s word processor is part of what was once known as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and which is now called Google Docs (probably because it also includes Presentation, Google’s new slideshow application). All three applications are accessible through a single Google Docs interface that offers up a list of current documents that can be organized by name, date, or folder; topics at the side allow you to filter the list according to folder, type, or who you’re sharing with. You can either start a new document or upload HTML, Word, .RTF, .ODT, or .SXW (StarOffice) documents up to 500KB in size.

The working interface of Google Docs is a model of simplicity. A drop-down File menu offers basic save/print options; you can also export your document as an HTML, .RTF, Word, OpenOffice, .PDF, or text file, get a word count, or do a find and replace.

Three other tabs offer access to Edit, Inset, and Revisions features; as you click on each, you get the associated toolbar below. The Edit toolbar offers basic formatting functionality: cut/copy/paste; bold, italics, underline; font, size, color, highlighting; bulleted and numbered lists, flush left, right, and center. The Insert tab lets you place links, comments, tables, bookmarks, separators (for instance, page breaks) and special characters in the text. Revisions (which is available for spreadsheets and presentations as well) gives you the chance to revert to past versions of your document.

That is pretty much it. If you want page numbers, headers, or footers — sorry. Don’t even think about more complex print formats like columns or indexing. Google Docs is mainly for day-to-day tasks, especially if your text is eventually meant to be posted on the Web. In fact, the Share and Publish features, which are accessible via two tabs on the right side of the working area, are the major strengths of the Google applications.

Share lets you invite friends and colleagues as collaborators (with full editing capabilities) or viewers; you can give your collaborators permission to invite others. Another feature, the somewhat confusingly named “Invitations may be used by anyone,” actually allows you use mailing lists to invite groups of users (who must have a registered Google account in order to edit the document).

I’ve found the Share feature to be very useful when working on documents with other people — even in real time (a discreet message at the bottom of the window lets you know who is currently editing the document). You can also publish your document to a Google page (the URL is assigned by Google) or to your blog. Unfortunately, however, there is no way to undo any specific changes to the document. You can see who made which changes by checking the Revisions area, which color codes the changes.

On the whole, Google Docs is a good basic word processor, especially if you tend to live online. However, most of us will still need to keep Microsoft Word around for our professional word processing.

Replacing Microsoft Excel: Zoho Sheet

Sheet is one of the more polished and functional of the Zoho applications. It’s an almost note-perfect replacement for Excel or similar products — perhaps because a spreadsheet lends itself a little more easily to being replicated in a Web browser than, say, a word processor. And yet there are still some things that get in the way.

If you have existing spreadsheets you want to import, Sheet lets you do this by uploading files directly through a browser or pointing to a file somewhere on the Web. Excel 97/2003 documents, OpenDocument and OpenOffice 1.x spreadsheets, and plain old .CSV files are all supported, but as of yet there doesn’t appear to be a way to e-mail documents to be converted into Sheet (as with Writer). Sheet also makes a best-effort attempt to preserve the formatting of the imported documents, including hyperlinks.

The list of math functions available is pretty impressive — there’s dozens of them in the full list — and when you insert a function in a cell you can browse the function list by category (financial, statistical, engineering, etc.) to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Better yet, there’s full contextual documentation for each function.

Some limitations of the program, however, really frustrated me. Inserting functions or formulas didn’t always work — I sometimes had to save the document, close it, and reopen it to get the computed formulas to show up. Another frustration: you can’t input a range of cells to be arbitrarily selected. This would make it possible to select a range of cells that is too big to fit on the screen, which right now is next to impossible.

What I also kept running into, again, were limits of either the program’s design or the fact that it was running as a browser document. You can select a range of cells by clicking and dragging (as is done in just about every other spreadsheet), but if you right-click, suddenly you’re only getting a contextual menu for the one cell you had the pointer over.

Once again, it’s the collaborative functions that make Sheet really useful. You can publish individual cells, ranges of cells, or share whole sheets or workbooks with specific users. The export-to-PDF function is also useful — in fact, that’s probably the best way to get consistent output from the Zoho suite for printing.

The biggest drawback to the program is something I saw consistently throughout Zoho: often you’re at the mercy of what a Web browser can do. With Sheet, though, I have confidence the programmers can find elegant ways to work around those limitations and make a good program even better.

Replacing Microsoft Excel: Google Spreadsheet

Spreadsheet is one of the three applications that makes up Google Docs. Like the word processor, it is a solid basic product with little of the sophistication of its MIcrosoft counterpart.

For those who use spreadsheets at their most basic, the Google application is very simple to work with. A tab titled Formulas gives immediate access to the most popular operations (Sum, Average, etc.); click on the “More” link, and you get a pop-out box that offers a wide selection of operations, organized by type (Math, Financial, Logical, etc.). Be careful where you click, though; once you have an operation open, any cell you click on becomes part of that operation, which is handy if you’re careful, but in my case, it resulted in quite a few extraneous entries.

Because Spreadsheet is definitely a work in progress, you may find yourself occasionally resorting to workarounds that later caused problems. For example, when Spreadsheet was new I needed a series of dates (such as such as 01/01/2007, 01/02/2007) in my A column. At the time the program didn’t have a feature to automatically create a range of incremental dates. I created a workaround that added +1 to each date, but when I deleted one of the dates, it created havoc with the rest of the series. (Google has since added that feature.)

The charting features, accessed from the Edit menu, work well, but your options for customizing the charts are definitely limited. You can create five types of charts — column, line, bar, pie, and scatter — and several sub-types of each. You can specify which data to include and label the two axes, but that’s about it. Even for simple charts, that’s not quite enough. For example, when I created a chart based on two columns of data, one of which were simple numbers and the other of which were dates, I couldn’t find any way to get the actual dates to show up as labels on the x-axis.

You can import .XLS, .ODS, .CSV, and .TXT files, and export in those formats as well as HTML and PDF. You can add worksheets; sort each column in increasing or decreasing order; freeze rows; and create charts. Many of the formatting, sharing, and revision features are the same as are provided in Google Docs. Like Docs, you can also view your spreadsheets on a mobile device, but the formatting on that device isn’t quite as consistent as it is with Docs.

Google Spreadsheets is very handy for those of us who only need to occasionally use spreadsheets for organizing data or doing simple calculations, and it offers enough operations to suit most uses. But for more complex calculations, or if you depend on charts to visualize your data, Excel is still the better deal.

Replacing Microsoft Outlook: Zoho Mail

Zoho Mail boasts the closest approximation to its Microsoft counterpart (Outlook) in the Zoho galaxy — not just because it handles mail, as the name implies, but also because it provides quite a few of Outlook’s other functions, like calendaring, task lists, contact management and so on. It’s closer to a mini-suite than just an application, actually, given how much is packed into it.

The interface is similar to Outlook’s own multi-paned display (including a customizable “swipe bar” on the left-hand side), so people making the switch from Outlook should not be thrown too badly at first. As with many of Zoho’s other offerings, the big plus is collaboration. Multiple Mail users can be aggregated into a Group, and interact closely by sharing information (documents, messages, etc.) and assigning duties and tasks. But I suspect the big test of how useful Mail will be for existing Office users will come after Zoho rolls out closer integration for Outlook.

When you use Mail, you “connect” a third-party POP3-accessible mailbox to your Zoho Mail account, Mail will then poll that account periodically, even when you’re not logged in. Mail also assumes by default, correctly, that e-mail from any account you’re hooking up should be left in the mailbox, since you might still be accessing it from another client. Also bear in mind that if you’re sending e-mail from Zoho, you need to have access to an outbound (SMTP) e-mail server that will accept authenticated connections from third-party clients.

Newly-created mail can be edited as either plain-text or HTML — I’m a staunch user of plain text e-mail, so I opted for that automatically. The address fields autosuggest entries from your contacts list, and you can add contacts from the From: field of any e-mail you open up, so it’s relatively easy to build up a contact list from scratch. If you want to import an existing contacts list, you can upload a VCF, LDIF or CSV file, but there’s no two-way integration. (Zoho is working on adding closer integration with Office to allow things like this in the future.) I also liked the universal search function, which lets you hunt for anything filed in Mail with a keyword.

If you’re an Outlook user, the calendar function is probably going to be one of the first things you try to migrate data to. Right now, Calendar only accepts imported data in ICS format (something you need a little third-party help to accomplish), but the list of functions in Calendar itself is impressive enough that you are not going to feel functionally deprived. Event reminders can be e-mailed to you or displayed as popup windows, and scheduled events can be related to items in the Tasks list if needed. There doesn’t appear to be a way to import lists of tasks, but the way tasks are set up is also closely reminiscent of Outlook, with priority, status, reminder notices, percentage of completion and the ability to assign tasks to other team members.

Other elements in the Mail mini-suite echo or incorporate elements of other Zoho applications. The Documents function, for instance, lets you upload and organize all manner of files. (Uploaded audio files can even be played back in the browser). Notes is a freeform, categorizable notepad much like Outlook’s own Notes function, and the Links section lets you organize libraries of URLs that are either entered manually or imported from an existing document. Also included are links to Writer, Sheet, and Show, all of which open instances of those programs within Mail itself.

Mail isn’t free — it’s one of the more advanced, for-pay components of the Zoho suite, and given how ambitious it is I’m not surprised they want to charge for its usage. But perhaps in the future we’ll see a stripped-down, no-cost version for those of us who don’t need the full gamut of features.

Replacing Microsoft Outlook: Gmail/Google Calendar

Google would have an excellent alternative to Microsoft Outlook, if its various personal information apps would only work together.

Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, is the most interesting, and different, of all its applications. Unlike Outlook (and most other e-mail applications) , Gmail doesn’t let you use folders to organize your messages, aside from basics like the Inbox and Sent Mail folders. Instead, you are asked to label them; you can then filter your inbox to show only the e-mails matching that label. It’s not difficult to use — you can create and assign as many labels as you need, and you can have them automatically assigned as each message comes in. (You can’t, however, choose to filter for two labels, or look at all your e-mails except a certain label.)

Gmail also offers a variety of filtering and forwarding options; if your Inbox is getting too unwieldy but you don’t want to delete any e-mails, you can archive those messages you don’t really need anymore. But of course, this is Google, so if you’re looking for a specific e-mail, even an archived one, the fastest way to find it is to simply search on a phrase. If it’s there, you’ll find it.

Gmail is nicely flexible when it comes to using the service as an extension of your other accounts. For example, if you’d prefer to use Gmail with Outlook or another e-mail application, you can download Gmail as POP mail. On the other end, you can use Gmail to send mail from your other e-mail addresses (so that you don’t have to confuse your correspondents with too many different e-mail addresses), and you can fetch mail from up to five other accounts.

One of my favorite aspects of Gmail is the way it threads conversations. While applications such as Outlook treat each e-mail is seen as an independent entity, Gmail sees messages as items in a thread (or, as Google puts it, a “conversation”), so that each appears onscreen as one in a series of overlapping cards. Thus, an e-mail back-and-forth can be immediately seen in context.

Google’s Calendar application is also excellent; unfortunately, it is not paired with Gmail in any effective way — you can’t use Gmail’s contact list to make an appointment in Google Calendar, for example. Calendar makes it simple to add events, invite others to scheduled events, and track your invitations. It also lets you include as many private and public “calendars” as you like: you can track separate work and home calendars, your spouse’s and kids’ schedules, and add publicly-available iCal calendars. There is a mobile version of the Google Calendar available for your smartphone (including the iPhone). However, there is as yet no way to access Calendar off-line.

For many of us, a Todo list is a must, but Google doesn’t offer any type of task tracking. There are, if you look around the Web, a number of third-party software apps that will work alongside Google Calendar and/or iGoogle (Google’s desktop home page) — I’m particularly fond of one called RememberTheMilk.

One of the biggest disappointments about Gmail is its contact listings. Granted, Gmail is about e-mail, not about keeping track of your contacts, but as long as you’re at it, why not offer that as well? Gmail does maintain a contact list that is populated from sent/received e-mails; each contact is associated with any messages that has been sent or received from that person, which is handy. You can also import contacts in CSV format and add images, address, etc. But it’s obvious that Contacts is not meant to be a serious tool for tracking your associates — if, for example, a colleague has sent you e-mail from more than one address, you’ll have two contact entries with no apparent way to merge them.

So while Google offers a number of really useful personal information apps — Gmail and Calendar are standouts — if you’re an Outlook user who wants to integrate your e-mail, scheduling, and contact information in any kind of efficient way, you may want to stick with Microsoft for now.

Replacing Microsoft PowerPoint: Zoho Show

Show emulates most of the really important core functionality of PowerPoint — in other words, all the things the vast majority of us use PowerPoint for in the first place. The most recent versions of PowerPoint have new design tools which Show does not have, but again, Show’s got the vast majority of what people need to get this work done. Most people will have no trouble creating polished-looking work with it.

Many of the tools and their behavior in Show will be familiar. New presentations can be created with your choice of several basic theme templates which can be customized to a fair degree. When you insert new slides, you also have your choice of slide templates — blank, title only, title with bullet points, and so on. Copying or reordering existing slides is as easy as right-clicking on them or dragging and dropping them in the thumbnail sidebar, and adding text, images or geometric shapes is about as intuitive as it can be.

When you click “Slide Show,” the presentation opens in a separate window (which can be maximized to fill the screen by hitting F11), and can be played back at your choice of speeds. Presentations can be shared out remotely, exported to HTML, or embedded in another Web page, but unfortunately there’s no way to export to PDF.

Show would be very limited if you couldn’t also import existing presentations. Both regular PowerPoint PPT / PPS files and OpenOffice ODP files can be uploaded and converted with good fidelity. Documents can also be imported as “read-only,” which converts all text to images.

Some of the more exotic things missing from Show would be difficult to replicate in a browser-based app — like dual-display support, so the presentation could be on one display and your notes on another. For what it attempts to do so far, though, Show is more than adequate for most people.

Replacing Microsoft PowerPoint: Google Presentation

Google Presentation is the latest addition to the Google Docs suite, and as such, it’s the least developed. It’s accessible through the Google Docs main screen; you simply click on the Google Doc’s drop-down New menu and choose Presentation.

At the beginning, you get a simple opening card offering a place to put a title and subtitle. After that, it’s very easy to insert a theme (at the time I was working with Presentation, I counted 15) and one of several layouts, including a blank page for the more creative among us.

Google Presentation is simple, both in execution and available features. You can insert text and change font, color, size, and highlight. You can add images and change their size (the aspect ration is automatically preserved). You can add links to URLs and email addresses. You can create numbered and bulleted lists, center text or place it flush left/right. You can take any document you’ve created in Docs (but not Spreadsheet) and save it as a presentation.

And that’s about it. If you’re planning to add fancy transitions to your presentation, you won’t find them here — in fact, there aren’t any transitions of any kind, and don’t even think about music or other multimedia.

However, you can make your presentation easily available online — in fact, when you start the presentation, there is automatically an area at the side for the audience and a button that let’s you “take control” of the presentation. You can chat by typing into a box at the bottom of the window. (Presumably, any discussion you’d have about the presentation would have to come from a phone conversation, or another source.)

Presentation, like some of Google’s other apps (for example, Google Creator) seems to be aimed at the most basic functionality that somebody would possibly need. Certainly, you could put together a reasonably good presentation in record time using Google Presentation, but if you wanted anything approaching professionalism, you would have to create your presentation in, say, PowerPoint (you can upload a PPT or PPS file). You could then use Google’s share and/or publish features to show it off.

Replacing Microsoft OneNote: Zoho Notebook

Notebook is like a binder for assembling material in many formats, both from other parts of Zoho and from the Web at large. You can pick up Sheet spreadsheets, Writer documents, Show presentations, RSS feeds, video, audio and plain old images and text, and scrapbook them together in various ways. Embedded video or audio plays back via a Flash application, much as it does on sites like MySpace or YouTube.

Notebook is a little like a cross between a desktop publisher and an HTML editor, although its function is not really to allow creation of standalone Web pages or sites. It’s more a way to compile disparate things in a sort of fixed presentation format. Those of you familiar with Microsoft’s OneNote will find all this strikingly familiar, although Notebook lacks many of OneNote’s more advanced features, like transcribing handwritten notes.

A Notebook document consists of pages — again, like a scrapbook — onto which you place elements. When you add an element you’re given several choices of actions you can perform: you can point to a URL somewhere, upload the element manually, type it in (if it’s text), or import it from elsewhere in your Zoho portfolio of documents. The element can be sized — this is the part that reminded me most of a desktop publishing app — pinned into place, or floated to the front or back. Notebook also supports version-tracking for individual objects, so you can revert changes if need be.

If you don’t want to upload audio or video, you can record either one directly into a Notebook document via a Flash application. You’ll need to allow Flash to access your microphone or camera to do that, so this might not work on a configuration where the machine has been locked down, but it’s still a splendid feature. Some formats aren’t supported directly but can be embedded anyway: a PDF file added to a page, for example, didn’t show up as a visible image, it did show up as an icon with a link to launch it in a separate window.

The published results are viewed in a special Notebook interface with page-flipping controls, not just as flat Web pages. Again, Zoho’s universal sharing functions come in handy here: you can share not only whole notebooks and individual pages, but individual objects, either with the world at large or with specific people. This makes Notebook a good way to share things that don’t fit into an easily-pigeonholed category, even if the implementation is still limited, again, by what a browser’s capable of.

Replacing Microsoft OneNote: Google Notebook

Google Notebook
Google Notebook is less a data catch-all than a way to track all the small interesting stuff that you find on the Web — like that quote you saw on Valleywag, for example, or the snazzy new mobile phones reported on, uh, InformationWeek.

Unlike Microsoft OneNote, which is fashioned to look like a scrapbook, Notebook works on a simpler level. The app attaches itself as a button to the lower right-hand corner of your browser; click on it, and you get a small pop-up window with the name of that particular Notebook on top (you can create as many as you wish).

To add new entries, you can click on the “Clip” or “New note” buttons in the Notebooks window; drag and drop a highlighted segment of a Web page into the window; or right click on a highlighted segment and click on the “Note This” menu item that Google adds to your browser’s right-click menu. However you do it, the result is that the highlighted text clip and/or image is saved to that notebook, together with the name of the page (which is automatically linked to its URL). There is a separate area for each item where you can add comments, or you can edit the entry itself.

Your Notebooks are listed to the side of your item window; the list can be visible or hidden. You can delete notes or move them to new Notebooks from the small browser window; if you want to do a search through all your items, you need to go to your Notebook’s home page — this is essentially a Google page that lets you do a typically efficient Google search.

You can also, of course, share your Notebooks, and this can be a powerful tool. When you want to share a Web reference with a friend or colleague, there is nothing easier than simply dropping the reference into a shared Notebook, where it is instantly available. There is one problem, though: Unless you actually tell your colleague that the reference is there, they may not notice the addition. It would be a great improvement if there was some way to notify the users of shared notebooks that a new entry had been made.

In short, while Google Notebook is not in the same league as Microsoft OneNote, which collects other data besides that found on the Web, it is an extremely useful applet for those of us who need to quickly collect and organize Web factoids as we surf.

Replacing Microsoft Access: Zoho Creator

Creator fills a sadly neglected niche: It’s a database application something like what FileMaker user to be and what Microsoft Access never really was to begin with. Also, unlike most other online applications, Creator is not at the mercy of your Web browser but a complement to it — it’s a great example of how to put together a powerful AJAX application that works well.

When you create a database in Creator, you can start entirely from scratch or use one of a set of prefab data collection forms: available templates include a bug tracker, DVD collection form, to-do list, and, whatever its usefulness to you, a blood donation form. Creator’s template designer is extremely powerful. You can drag and drop fields and field elements, or assign scriptable actions to individual fields when the user adds or changes data. The scripting engine for Creator, by the way, is amazingly powerful and well-designed. You need to understand JavaScript syntax to make the most of it, but the way it facilitates script creation and editing is downright artful. There are desktop applications that don’t have tools this good.

You can import data into Creator from an existing Excel or .CSV file or, as with Writer you can e-mail a plain-text data dump to a specially-generated e-mail address (Creator provides you with a template for the text format). You can also copy and paste data in tab-delimited format into an input field. (The latter might actually be easier, since you can simply declare the first row of the pasted data to be the field names, which is probably closer to the format most such data is already in).

When you set up views for entering or displaying data, Creator provides five basic models: a list view, a spreadsheet, a summary, a calendar and (newly introduced) a graphical chart. Pick the one that suits your data best: the calendar view is great for organizing appointments or other data ranges where the date is the most crucial element, while spreadsheet and list are best for seeing whole sheets of data at once. For the chart view, you need to pick which records are to be used to generate each axis or aspect of the chart you’re generating, but it takes very little time to select what you want, and the results look remarkably professional.

As with the other Zoho tools, the sharing functions make Creator particularly useful. Other users can be invited to add data or edit the database schema itself; or the data input forms can be made public to allow anyone to submit data as needed. Another sharing option of sorts, “Embed in Website,” generates HTML code to allow an input form to be embedded in a separate Web site via an iframe.

A slightly more upscale version of Creator, named DB and Reports, went online as I was evaluating Zoho. It’s still somewhat rough, but the emphasis here is more on creating charts, reports, pivot tables, and views from existing data. It also understands SQL queries from many broadly-used dialects of SQL (including MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and ANSI), and can import existing data from standard file formats like XLS and CSV. Most people will want to start with Creator and graduate to DB if they haven’t used this sort of thing before.

The Verdict: Zoho

Because Zoho is an online application, it’s limited by two things: connectivity and the capacities of a Web browser. That said, the makers of the Zoho suite have done a lot to ameliorate both of these things.

The first problem, connectivity, affects not only the availability of data, but also your ability to use the suite at all. To offset this, you can install desktop versions of some of the Zoho apps (Writer, Sheet, and Show, to name three) which can then access your documents on the Zoho server as needed. These local versions of the apps use the Desktopize toolkit to make the program(s) run locally, although if you want to use them entirely offline you also need to install the Google Gears browser extension. Another cross-compatibility feature is a plugin for Microsoft Office that allows Word and Excel to open and save documents directly to and from the Zoho repository.

The issue of browser capacity is more problematic, and involves a constant clash between the behaviors I would have expected out of a desktop application and the behaviors I’ve come to expect from a Web site. For instance, the “page loading” activity icon in Firefox would sometimes start up when I did something, which led me to believe that at any second the page would erase itself and refresh. False alarms like this caused me to stop working for seconds on end in anticipation of things that never materialized. Right-clicking doesn’t always give you predictable results, either. I’m used to the idea of right-clicking on something to get a context menu, but sometimes a right-click action gave me the browser’s right-click menu, and not the application in the browser.

Within the confines of what can be done comfortably in a browser, the Zoho applications are downright inspiring. As long as you don’t run afoul of those limitations, it’s possible to get real work done. But at least for now, there are still many things that will be the domain of a desktop application.

The Verdict: Google

Google has made some attempts to collect its varied range of applications into some kind of order, but on the whole, because only some of them are associated with others, you can only judge each app on its own.

In addition, judged against desktop applications such as those in Microsoft Office, Google’s aren’t quite ready to take over. For basic usage, Google’s word processor, spreadsheet and (to a lesser extent) presentation package are all fine. Gmail, because it works so differently than its peers, can be considered either an innovative and highly useful way to work with your e-mail, or too awkward, depending on the individual. (The fact that you can now use IMAP to sync Gmail across devices is a real plus.) And Google Calendar is an excellent way to keep up with (and share) your schedule. But on the whole, Google’s feature set is not nearly as extensive as Microsoft’s, and in some cases not even up to reasonable business standards (for example, Google Docs’ lack of any header or footer capabilities).

So, on the whole, Google’s applications are not ready to substitute for those provided by Microsoft Office. However, they do offer different benefits that, like Zoho’s, reflect the fact that they are Web-based: the ability to easily collaborate with other users and/or groups of users; the ability to access your documents no matter what computer you’re using; and the ability to quickly add interesting third-party applets. In addition, the mobile versions of Google’s apps are a real plus (although the fact that not all of Google’s applications sync to offline versions can be a problem).

While they may not be as sophisticated as those in most suites, these apps are not bad — and quickly getting better. If you’re a heavy user of online resources, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make the acquaintance of at least some of Google’s applications — there’s a good chance that they will be ready for the big time fairly soon.

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Growing Pains: Can Web 2.0 Evolve Into An Enterprise Technology?

By Andy Dornan

Forget outsourcing. the real threat to IT pros could be Web 2.0. While there’s a lot of hype and hubris surrounding wikis, mashups, and social networking, there’s also a lot of real innovation–much of it coming from increasingly tech-savvy business users, not the IT department.

“We’ve cut IT staff by 20%, and we’re providing a whole lot more in terms of IT services,” says Ken Harris, CIO at nutritional products manufacturer Shaklee. Harris started with a mashup platform from StrikeIron; he found mashups such an effective way to integrate multiple Web services that he turned to Web-based service providers to replace in-house functions. Now, Shaklee gets its ERP from Workday and search from Visual Sciences, and it’s looking at other IT functions that software as a service can replace.

And Web 2.0 means more than just SaaS. Though the term is often abused, all the various technologies, products, and sites grouped together as “Web 2.0″ do have one thing in common: interactivity. Web 2.0 is designed for two-way communication. At the technical level, it replaces static HTML with (usually) JavaScript apps that continually send and receive small chunks of XML or text. At the social level, it means Web sites that let people communicate, not just read or shop. Instead of passive consumers, Web surfers can become active creators.

All that interactivity ought to make Web 2.0 ideally suited for business use. Most workplaces are about production, not consumption. However, enterprises lag far behind consumers in adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. What’s more, our online poll shows that interest in technologies such as blogs, wikis, and mashups has gone down during 2007, despite explosive growth outside the firewall.

Part of the reason is that business users already have access to more sophisticated versions of the same technologies. Blogging is publishing, a wiki is a CMS (content management system), and Ajax is a more standardized way of achieving what many internal enterprise apps already do with ActiveX or Java. Now, that doesn’t mean new technologies can be ignored–their lower costs and simpler administration mean they will quickly overtake legacy platforms, and already have done so in some areas. But it does mean they need to fit in with their predecessors.

WIKI WISH LIST
“It’s awful having an artificial distinction between a wiki and a CMS,” says Aaron Hathaway, CIO at investment bank Prager, Sealy & Co. In common with most of the users in our poll, he sees wikis as having greater use within enterprises than other Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs. Wikis’ other big attraction is that, in keeping with their collaborative nature, almost all of them are free.

Hathaway started using wikis four years ago to manage the IT department’s internal documentation, but soon saw that the technology could be more widely applicable. In 2005, he decided to roll out TWiki, a popular enterprise wiki whose other users include Yahoo and British Telecom.

It was a decision Hathaway came to regret in fairly short order.

The problem was that TWiki couldn’t easily share data with Alfresco, the bank’s open source CMS. Users who needed information had to look in both, while those adding documents risked duplicating effort. The bank didn’t want to give up on either, so Hathaway turned instead to Deki Wiki, which is also open source but backed by a commercial vendor, MindTouch. Deki’s Web services API eases integration with other applications. “It means a Google map can show up on a Deki page, and we’re building an über-search,” he says. “In my ideal setup, Deki would be a front end to Alfresco.” The API also lets the wiki use the bank’s existing security architecture to limit user access to specific pages, important for preserving the wall between analysis and sales. According to Hathaway, the wiki is now providing a real return on investment.

A wiki is easier to use than a full CMS, but on its own it can’t yet provide some CMS functionality, such as working with documents and files. This has led several wikis to add extension capabilities, such as Deki Wiki’s API. TWiki also has a plug-in system that lets programmers extend it without editing source code; more than 200 modules are already available to cover applications such as calendaring and automated editing. The most ambitious is IBM’s QEDWiki, which aims to be a platform for user-created mashups and other simple applications, rather than just content. The mashup aspect empowers users even more than the “edit” button and also helps integrate the wiki with IBM’s other applications.

Still, companies like Prager, Sealy can’t abandon their content management systems just yet, and the most popular collaboration platform remains Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint also is at the center of Microsoft’s online Office Live strategy, best described as “software plus service.” Rather than a Google-style suite of online apps that would compete with its own products, Microsoft sells SharePoint and Outlook as services, with a subset of the full functionality soon to be available at no cost. Users still need a client-side application to edit documents, theoretically giving them the best of both worlds–and preserving Microsoft’s Office revenue stream.

A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE NETWORK?
Of all Web 2.0 technologies, social networking is the one that gets vendors and venture capitalists most excited. At least 17 startups are pitching social networking technology to business customers (see table, Social Networking Technology Startups), while countless social networking Web sites are chasing individual users. But it’s also the one about which our readers are most skeptical: When asked to rate the value of technologies, 68% say that public social networking sites are of no use at all. Only 5% rate any kind of social networking as very useful.

Still, one type of company finds these public sites very exciting: recruiters.

“We have great expectations for Facebook,” says Jason Blessing, general manager of the small and midsize business division at recruitment service provider Taleo. “The thing we really like is that it has a heritage from the top universities, and it’s a place where the Gen Y’s or millennials like to hang out.” His company rolled out a Web service that its SMB customers use to advertise jobs through Facebook’s API, letting users recommend their friends (or friends of friends of friends) for specific positions.

Rather than joining the big social networking sites, many enterprises are trying to compete with them. Though few respondents to our poll have yet added social networking to their Web sites, many of the startups pitching the technology have scored big-name customers. The media industry is particularly well-represented among clients of companies like KickApps and Leverage Software, with newspapers and TV stations trying to find a way to keep their audiences interested. The panic is driven by surveys showing that people under 24 prefer user-generated content and connections with others over traditional media.

Other enterprises can benefit from setting up social networks as a means to communicate with customers–and let customers communicate with one another. The big question for enterprises: Do we buy dedicated social networking technology or wait until it becomes a standard feature of Web servers and hosting services?

THE SEARCH FOR A BUSINESS CASE
As the table below shows, startups differ widely in how they sell their technology, or in some cases, give it away. The majority have SaaS business models, but some sell software or appliances. Free services can seem attractive, but in most cases vendors retain ownership of users’ data, something that could threaten both trade secrets and customer privacy. This is a particular risk given the likely fate of at least some startups–privacy policies and contractual obligations don’t always survive bankruptcy and liquidation. Though they all try to sell to enterprises, some vendors such as Pringo Networks and Kick Apps are finding that their largest market is niche sites, where social networking is an end in itself. These sites are essentially in the media business, with business models based on selling ads. They’re betting that users will ultimately be more loyal to sites narrowly focused on an industry, sports team, or hobby than a giant network that anyone can join. The relatively few vendors focused on social networking for use within an enterprise intranet, such as Awareness Networks and Tacit, often provide these features as part of a larger Web 2.0 suite that includes blogs and wikis.

When database vendor Endeca wanted to roll out a social networking site aimed at customers and system integrators, it rejected off-the-shelf software in favor of a homegrown system. Though enthusiastic about social networking for customers, Endeca isn’t convinced it has a role to play internally. “We’re still holding off on what the ROI is for our own employees,” says Colby Dyeff, Endeca’s IT manager. “It’s hard to say if that’s a valuable use of their time.”

Many of Endeca’s contributors are system integrators selling their expertise, giving them a direct financial incentive to be highly rated. But the same lessons can apply to social networks elsewhere, where rating content is also a way to help people find others with similar interests or locate related information. The former isn’t of much use within an enterprise, but the latter could be, especially given the poor state of enterprise search compared with the big Internet search engines.

This kind of tagging isn’t strictly social networking, so it’s usually described as social bookmarking, based more on Del.icio.us than MySpace. It’s a big part of Connectbeam’s social networking appliance, as well as new Web 2.0 platforms from IBM and BEA Systems. IBM’s system is called Dogear, part of its larger Lotus Connections suite that also includes blogs, wikis, and shared workspaces. BEA’s entry, AquaLogic Pathways, is sold alongside its Pages and Ensemble mashup tools. Both products are relatively new, as is the concept of enterprise social bookmarking itself.

Relatively few vendors are pushing full-scale social networking for intranets. Of those that are, Visible Path is the most ambitious. Its service tries to span the extranet as well as intranet, linking staff to contacts within other organizations as well as their own. Its pitch is heavily oriented toward sales staffers, who can use social networking as a way to reach prospects, as is its own go-to-market strategy: Rather than sell directly to enterprises, it prefers to go through partners like Oracle and Salesforce.com, whose CRM systems its social networking is integrated with. Most people won’t join a social network just so that salespeople can contact them, of course, so Visible Path emphasizes its security and privacy controls at both the individual and corporate levels. Users can decide what sort of introductions they want to receive, while companies can override employee choices. That might seem to make Visible Path impractical as a sales tool, since blocking unsolicited sales pitches is a no-brainer. According to its users, however, this isn’t necessarily the case.

“People don’t have to be users to be accessed through it,” says Rod Morris, VP of business information solutions at LexisNexis. Morris uses the tool to promote his company’s ExecRelate service, which tracks relationships between C-level executives and board members in publicly traded companies–people who are more likely to rely on the old-boy network than LinkedIn or Twitter.

FREE FOR THE TAKING
Still, vendors will have to show hard ROI before these technologies will be adopted by enterprises, and that could be difficult with so many free alternatives. The long-term evolution of Web 2.0 in business is likely to trace a path similar to that of instant messaging, which has comparable social characteristics to wikis, blogs, and social networks, and initially followed a parallel adoption curve in business. IM was brought in by people who used it in their personal lives, and though many people resisted it at first, IM quickly became an enterprise staple: Three-quarters of all organizations in our survey use it; half say they find it very useful or critical to their business.

So far, so much like any other technology. Home users are driving innovation, so it’s no surprise to see the enterprise lagging. But unlike the PC a generation ago, IM has managed to colonize the workplace without going native. Despite frequent warnings from security vendors that unrestrained use of consumer IM technology can violate privacy policies, give attackers a back door into the network, and even send executives to jail, most companies happily use the same free services as teenagers. Fewer than 30% of respondents in our online poll have enterprise IM servers such as Lotus SameTime. Actual use is likely a lot lower, as staff in many companies ignore the officially sanctioned software and install their own. The move to enterprise voice over IP is bringing other players like Cisco Systems into the IM game, attempting to converge IM’s presence features with telephony, but they could be too late. The public IM services are already integrated into cell phones, another technology frequently used in the workplace but not controlled by IT.

IT’S LOOSENING GRIP
Loss of IT control is a consistent theme as Web 2.0 penetrates business. The greatest upheaval is likely to come from enterprise mashups, which combine the social and technical aspects of Web 2.0 by letting users develop their own applications. Though very few businesses use mashups at present, those that are see great benefits, and larger players such as BEA, IBM, and Oracle are entering the game. Cutting out the middleman–that’s the IT department–can be a great way of aligning business and technology.

“Mashups have let end users do more of what used to be done by IT,” says Warren Breakstone, executive VP in charge of client services at investment tools provider Thomson Financial. Although not in the IT department, Breakstone started using a hosted mashup service from Serena Software and now runs a team of business analysts who develop Web-based applications for sales, marketing, and other personnel. “Now we’re moving into traditional IT services: The IT department is using apps that we built.”

Breakstone says this doesn’t bring his team into conflict with the IT department. “It frees IT up to do those mission-critical tasks behind the scenes,” he says.

IM itself is already giving way to newer technologies that are even further outside IT’s control. The leading candidate so far is Second Life. Though often seen (and increasingly scoffed at) as a marketing vehicle, its true potential is as a glorified chat room. Like IM, it’s free, but it gives users a more immersive experience and is designed for multiparty conversations.

“We found that Second Life allows more user engagement than traditional video or phone conferencing,” says Breakstone, who is testing Second Life as an environment for meetings. “One employee told me, ‘I’ve participated in lots of meetings and I tend to be very quiet, but I felt very comfortable opening up in Second Life.’”

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YourStreet Relaunches; White Label & Widgets On the Way

By Kristen Nicole

YourStreets found it wasn’t working out as a real estate resource for localized content, so it’s switched gears to become an aggregator of local data based on individual neighborhoods. This makes sense on several levels, but it’s a difficult task to undertake, and must be executed well for optimal results.

As it’s become a human-influenced search engine to some extent, it has the job of bringing all the relevant data, based on your neighborhood, to the forefront of your results. As a user you can submit your own content, and view other users (neighbors) that are nearby.

This is all displayed on a map as well, offering you a bit more context and an interactive way at which to delve for more information. Additionally, users can converse on various local topics, and these conversations (discussions) will appear along with your search results and on the map as well.

I really like this concept of incorporating several aspects of local life into an aggregated resource, which is rather similar (though less intrusive) that what we’ve seen from Fat Door. So far, the biggest thing missing from YourStreet’s new aggregated view is filtering options to better scour through the data that’s been offered up.

Checking on the news around Chicago, I see a lot of content for sports, but I’d rather see what’s going on with restaurants within walking distance of my house. As it stands right now, there are no good filtering options that I can use to weed out the restaurant data from the rest.

Additionally, YourStreet has some big plans for its new service, which includes a white label solution. To this end, YourStreet will offer selected media partners, like newspapers, to offer a custom YourStreet map to show local news stories. I think extending this to support user-generated content could be a valuable offering to participating media companies as well.

There will also be a widget for you to put a neighborhood map on your blog, website or social networking profile. This embedded map will be constantly updated for new, incoming content. Both the white label solution and the widget offerings will be released early next year.

Source:Mashable.com

Business Intelligence Versus Business Analytics–What’s the Difference?

By Rock GnatovichThe marketing and analyst airwaves are flooding with speculation about what is next for business intelligence (BI). What will comprise BI 2.0?

Historically, this market has been served by vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos. But the competitive landscape is changing. Microsoft has now shrewdly entered the market by driving the placement of SQL servers into the space in order to broadly deploy and deliver its BI suite and reporting services in volume. Oracle has seen the effect of companies moving data out of the database to stage it for analysis. The resulting data warehouses have provided a degree of utility in housing, manipulating and delivering “strategic” information across the organization.

Recently though, established vendors such as SAP and Siebel have unveiled BI product suites under the banner of “analytics.” SAS, a perennial stalwart of the statistics market, is suddenly being touted as the number-three BI vendor and frequently positions itself as an analytics vendor.

With analytics finding its place within many functions and business processes it seems clear that it will be a defining feature of next generation business intelligence. Particularly, a significant new group of business users—a group I like to call “Go-To Guys”—are in need of analytics tools to tackle daily problems and opportunities. Go-To Guys are the operating managers of company—product managers, sales managers, researchers, engineers and marketers.

So, what is analytics? Neil Raden of Hired Brains, a market research and management consulting firm, has said that, “the proper term for interacting with information at the speed of business, analyzing and discovering and following through with the appropriate action, is ‘analytics’.”

CIOs often assume that business analytics (BA) comes along with BI. The traditional BI market has been associated with providing executive dashboards and reporting to monitor the assumptions and key performance metrics that are part of long term planning cycles.

Everybody wants a dashboard. To the extent that all of us are CEO’s of our own business discipline, we want a simple measurement display of how we are doing and an alert mechanism of when something goes wrong. Additionally, dashboards address the growing urgency around Sarbanes Oxley. Monitoring planning assumptions and key performance metrics has now become mission critical from a regulatory and compliance standpoint.

Where BI Stops and BA Begins
But BI reporting ends with the dashboard, which is sufficient only for some business planning, and BA picks up the rest for the Go-To Guys. Simply, this group must interact with data in a much different way from what traditional BI allows.

The Go-To Guys deal daily in unanticipated outcomes and unknown results and it is their job to mitigate risk and capitalize on opportunities. BI is not architected to iterate on new scenarios or for immediate response to unanticipated questions because it is set up to automate the distribution of standardized reports that monitor pre-determined key performance metrics and planning assumptions. BI’s answer to analytics has been to deliver the report to the business user and the business user typically takes the data in the report and dumps it into Microsoft Excel in order to do his own analysis.

As a result, there are $8B (yes, billion) of internally developed analytic applications with Excel as their front end. The BI players treat the output to Excel as a feature. But I actually think it’s a tremendous failing. It is proof that you don’t get BA when you buy BI. The BI architecture cannot support the operating needs of the business users to ask and answer their own questions in response to new occurrences and events in the marketplace.

Secondly, Excel is not an answer either. As soon as the data is dumped into Excel, the user is out of the BI system with no way back in. Any insight that the business user gains while interpreting Excel spreadsheets tends to stay with him—all opportunity for organizational learning or process improvement is lost.

So requirements for analytics are different than the requirements for BI, but the benefits are different as well.

Technically Speaking…
There’s also a technical component to all of this reinforcing the claim that the technical requirements to support analytics are different from the technical requirements that enable BI. To facilitate reporting and dashboards, BI traditionally works with aggregated data. Business users cannot rely solely on aggregated data in the operating environment. They have to be able to get to the details. The aggregated data will many times obscure the key issue or opportunity in your information.

BI data is typically staged in an OLAP cube to support drill-down. In analytics the Go-To Guys have to be able to get directly to the source data in the database. The key facts needed to make your operating decision are often not in the cube because they haven’t been anticipated by the IT department. This is not a question of the trees obscuring the forest—you have to be able to see both. The business users cannot be disconnected from the critical data needed to make a key business decision.

And lastly, the requirement of the BI system has been to monitor the data based on pre-configured questions requiring only a thin client environment to inform the user. In the operating world, users need to engage with the information requiring a richer client to support interactivity and the ability to ask and answer their own question without having to go back to IT.

What are the characteristics of an analytic savvy organization? First of all, even the planners want into the act. Analytics is enabling more proactive, high-frequency planning cycles. Planners are better able to refine and iterate the plan, shifting resources to higher performing areas with the goal of being first-to-market and never having a warehouse full of trendy goods once the trend is over. Secondly, the analytically savvy organization is more agile—able to adapt and respond—whether that’s to a competitor that releases a new product, a change to the pricing structure in the marketplace or the success of its own marketing campaign.

Remember, you don’t get business analytics when you buy business intelligence. The requirements are different and the benefits are different. The return on information and expertise achieved by arming your operating managers with analytics will supercharge your existing BI investment.

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