New Online Office Suite Emerges

May 21, 2007: A group of online application providers have come together and released what they are calling the world’s first online office suite based on open standards – ShareOffice.

iNetOffice, developer of browser-based word processing applications, online spreadsheet provider EditGrid and on-demand document management specialist ShareMethods have trumpeted the release of ShareOffice, saying the software combines an online office based on open standards with enterprise document management on-demand.

Based on the OpenSAM (Open Simple AJAX Mashup), the trio claim that ShareOffice addresses significant limitations in current office-productivity solutions, saying that desktop-productivity suites are proprietary closed systems difficult to extend and modify while the current crop of online office suites are targeted too broadly and do not address specific workflows.

ShareOffice pits itself as a superior offer due to its open standards base, support for business-critical workflows and its ability to operate as a software service via a browser while continuing to offer offline capabilities such as document synchronisation and local document backup.

The three say that ShareOffice enables collaborative teams to create, edit, and share documents and spreadsheets online; and can automatically generate common sales documents such as proposals, contracts, quotes, and customer letters in a single browser interface using customer data from salesforce.com.

“We are excited about the launch of ShareOffice for AppExchange,” said Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president and GM of AppExchange at salesforce.com. “The release of ShareOffice for AppExchange brings new capabilities to the sales and marketing user community including online document and spreadsheet creation, 'one-click documents' such as customer proposals and contracts, and rich integration with on-demand CRM.”

ShareOffice is available now from salesforce.com's AppExchange on-demand application sharing service, and also as a stand-alone service. ShareOffice pricing ranges from US$5 to US$45 per user per month.

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