The changing face of Office Productivity

No one will argue the fact that Microsoft’s Office suite of applications is the most ubiquitous Office Productivity suite on the market today. The suite that includes the popular programs Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook has dominated the landscape for many, many years. For most of this time, users had few, if any real alternatives. Those who chose lesser-known solutions were often faced with compatibility and interoperability issues when sharing files with Office users (who form a vast majority). That is of course, until now.

In recent years there have been a number of interesting developments in this space that actually give users viable alternatives to the Microsoft Office Suite. For many small businesses the cost of Microsoft solutions can be prohibitive so, leading the way for low-cost alternatives, is the OpenOffice suite available from OpenOffice.org. This open-source solution is freely available to individuals and businesses and is compatible with almost all major office suites on the market today. It also is platform independent and runs well on most major operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac. This solution offers a familiar interface and has all the basic functionality that users have come to expect from an Office Productivity suite.

While OpenOffice offers a very good alternative for traditional PC Office Productivity there are some equally interesting alternatives in a completely new space: web-based Office Productivity. These applications are entirely web-based meaning no program files are ever installed on your PC. They are available anytime the user connects to the web. There are already a number of players in this space including ThinkFree available from ThinkFree.com. This solution has all the essentials, accessible from most web-connected devices. Additional features include 1 GB of free online storage space and collaboration tools. Another major player has recently made a foray into the web-based Office Productivity space is Google. Last year Google introduced a suite of web-based applications that includes : Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Google Gmail, Google Calendar and Picassa (a photo editing and sharing application). The inclusion of Google’s Gmail makes this a very interesting low cost alternative to traditional Office Productivity.

There are of course some drawbacks associated with the use of online services for Office Productivity. Firstly these services are only available to their users when connected to the web (although some providers such as ThinkFree are now offering traditional PC based solutions to complement their online services). Secondly there are the ever-present concerns relating to privacy and data security that prevent many larger organizations from considering these services.

So what does all this mean for the everyday user of Office Productivity applications? It means that while Microsoft’s Office file formats remain as the de facto standard file formats, we now have some choice when it comes to the applications we chose to create, edit and share these files.

So what should one consider when trying to select from the options available? Users in the market should weigh the costs of additional features available from commercial packages like Microsoft’s Office against the benefit they would derive from those additional features. If you are not planning on making use of collaboration tools and other advanced features of these packages, is it really worth the added expense? Other important considerations include the users’ level of expertise and support requirements. While open-source solutions like OpenOffice have great cost-benefit ratios they remain open-source initiatives that do not have nearly the stability and support infrastructures offered by such organizations as Microsoft.

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