Why you need a Web Office

There is an interesting post by Richard MacManus at ZDNet on the potential benefits of web based Office applications. He in turn cites a whitepaper by Rod Boothby, a Manager with Ernst & Young's Financial Services Advisory practice. The whitepaper is subtitled "The Next Wave in Productivity Tools" and is well worth reading.

In discussing the collaborative benefits of Web Office, MacManus focuses on a very familiar scenario:

Ever tried to email a Word document to 10 of your colleagues and then keep track of changes or suggested changes? Most of us have been through that frustrating experience - it ends up as a huge and messy email thread. It's even worse if you try to use Microsoft Word's horrendous version tracking feature (all that crossed out red type makes it very hard to read).

As an aside, the last point was precisely why we developed integrations with Workshare. Our integration with the Workshare Compare Web Service gives clear comparison of any two Word documents simply in a browser window and independently of Microsoft's built-in version tracking functionality. To see how this works take a look at the "Versioning & Workshare" screencast here ).

Back to the main point, MacManus continues to paint his vision of a more productive future:

Imagine being able to view the latest version of a collaborative Word document, via your browser window. Instead of using emails to discuss the document, it's all done in one place - the URL of your online Word document. All changes are neatly tracked and versioned. Collaboration is happening, because there's a single point of reference on the Web - and it's not email!

The main benefits that MacManus identifies for a web-based word processor have nothing to do with word processing per se. The benefits are that the document is held centrally, is controlled, and is referenced via a URL. What struck me when reading this was that a browser-based ECM interface (like Altien Document Manager)provides exactly these benefits today.

These benefits are also independent of whether your application is internal or external to the organization - it is just using the technologies of the web browser. Web interfaces to enterprise applications have an obvious benefit in terms of deployment cost, but for ECM the impact is more profound because of the "linkability" web technology provides.

In ADM we provide a range of URL linking options: to individual documents or specific versions, to multiple document sets, to folders, to stored searches and search templates. End-users simply have to right click on the object they wish to link to and can then paste the appropriate URL into another document, web page or email. We also offer a dynamic search URL which allows parameters to be passed on the query string so developers can easily integrate with other applications or portals.

I don't want to get into the whole "turning data into information" cliche, but we have found this type of simple, flexible URL linking to be a very useful tool in enabling organizationss to gain greater value from their ECM systems.

One final point. Most of the comments on the MacManus post were negative in tone and concentrated on the typical doubts raised about SaaS - availability, performance, security etc. It seems to me that the value of browser-based Office-type tools should be considered separately from the value of SaaS. In my opinion, the kind of large enterprises we talk to would be interested in deploying browser-based applications of this sort today, but would not yet consider SaaS. For one thing they are presently deploying ECM systems to try and control the mass of unstructured content in their organizations and the last thing they need is a new external content silo. But this is a topic for another day.