Online office suites

SME IT/ COST CUTTING

Continuing our series on cheaper IT solutions

Last time, I touched upon the OpenOffice suite"" a free, open source office package from Sun Microsystems. This time around, I intend touching upon free online office suites. The only catch here is that you have to be connected to the Internet if you wish to use the applications herein. However, given the low cost of an "always on" broadband connection, these options are worth considering. This time around, I will take you through Google's offering in this space. Now Google is known to be a Microsoft baiter and has deliberately styled its office suite on lines that users can identify with"" indeed, a smart move.

You can start with Google docs at http://docs.google.com. Once you're there, you can upload word documents, OpenOffice, RTF, HTML or text (or create documents from scratch). You can use Google's WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor to format your documents, spell-check, etc. Moreover, you can invite others (by e-mail address) to edit or view your documents and spreadsheets.

Not only this, you can edit documents online with whomever you choose, view your documents' and spreadsheets' revision history and roll back to any version; publish documents and spreadsheets online to the world, as Web pages or post documents to your blog; download documents to your desktop as word, OpenOffice, RTF, PDF, HTML or zip; or even email your documents as attachments.

With the spreadsheets (similar to what Microsoft Excel offers), you can import and export .xls, .csv, .txt and .ods formatted data (and export functionality for .pdf and html). You can use the formatting and formula editing capabilities in the spreadsheets to calculate results and customise your data. Besides, you can chat in real time with others who are editing your spreadsheet, embed a spreadsheet, or a piece of a spreadsheet, in your blog or website.

Each document can be up to 500K, plus up to 2MB per embedded image. Each user has a limit of 1,000 documents and 1,000 images. As for the spreadsheets, each one can be up to 10,000 rows, or up to 256 columns, or up to 100,000 cells, or up to 40 sheets"" whichever limit is reached first. Each user has a limit of 200 spreadsheets. The limit on spreadsheets open at one time is 11.

Google packages all of this under a nice title called "Google Apps" which enables small businesses to give employees communication and collaboration tools. Google Apps includes email with professional addresses like krishna@your-company.com and up to 2 gigabytes (GB) of storage per account in its standard edition. If you pay $50 (around Rs 2100 a year) for each user account, Google provides a 10 GB email storage capacity (premium edition).

The advantage is that for this small an amount, you will get a guarantee of 99.9 per cent email uptime, besides having an option to do away with the text advertisements that Google features in its free standard package.

Google also features "Google Talk" with free text and voice calling capabilities. Other features include the calendar, page creator to create and publish to the web and a Start Page to access your inbox, calendar, docs and company info, plus search the web from one place.

And since it's all hosted by Google, there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. You can get up and running quickly, even if you don't have IT staff, and if you don't have an Internet domain yet, Google can nevertheless help you register one when you sign up (for just $10 or for around Rs 420 at today's prices).

The author is Editor (IT) at Business Standard