Another Online Productivity Suite Emerges

By Greg McNevin

November 28, 2007: Just when you thought the online office suite market couldn’t get more crowded, another competitor has jumped in the ring with the likes of Microsoft and Google and appears to have done what both heavyweights have so far struggled to do – unite the offline and online worlds.

Developer and Launched by InstaColl, founded by Sabeer Bhatia, a co-founder of Hotmail (which was purchased by Microsoft for US$500 million in 1998), Live Documents is a small suite of workflow applications that boast the functionality of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but can be used both offline and online.

Built with technologies such as Flash and Flex, the suite’s applications break down Microsoft’s XML into a browser-friendly format and enable documents to be accessed via a normal web browser. This enables normal office documents to be viewed, edited and collaborated on online, and if a document is edited offline, changes are automatically synchronised across the board when internet access returns – a feature that few other applications in this segment can currently claim.

Interestingly, the suite also embeds new functionality into Microsoft Office via an optional plugin, imbuing it with online collaborative capabilities and many other features that are currently only available in Microsoft Office 2007.

The software essentially brings together the two worlds Google and Microsoft are still trying to really tap into, a feat InstaColl highlights by dubbing its offering "services-plus-software", a reference to both companies visions.

InstaColl claims it has several corporations locked in for internal deployments, whether or not it can usurp both Google and Microsoft in the online productivity race will have to be seen.

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