When everyone yanked their spending after Lehman’s went down, we had another look at Google Apps – $50 a user a year is a huge cost saving on MS Office and you get file sharing, storage and backup/versioning thrown in. Works from any browser so you can ditch Windows too – another big saving.
The problem is… Google Apps/Docs doesn’t work very well. In fact it’s a curate’s egg – the multi-user collaboration in the spreadsheet is brilliantly effective and useful (and unique) but the spreadsheet grinds to a halt on anything larger than a summary profit & loss.
Worse, there’s no folder sharing – so you can’t set up a company’s shared file structure. The file versioning is great, especially in the spreadsheet, but you can’t use Office 07 formats and the Excel exporter eats certain functions.
Most of this is probably being worked on in the Willy Wonka factory, but getting large spreadsheets up to speed might require a browser plug-in – which sounds rather like the desktop software Google is trying to avoid…
Too bad, because it’s the future for many users – freedom from the desktop and power to thin clients.
[...] entry into the world of web-based office applications & collaboration – joining the still-ropey Google Docs/Apps and the vapourware Microsoft Live – it’s slick but limited for [...]
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