Live Documents, the new online documents competition

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Fun, Internet, E-mail, Office, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Live Documents, the new online documents competition

by Chris Gilmer Nov 23rd 2007

With more and more users building documents in web based applications, we were starting to think the market belonged to a handful of new companies like Zoho, ThinkFree, and a little upstart called Google. But it looks like there's another serious contender in the online Office space.

Live Documents has a strong pedigree. The service comes from the guy who created Hotmail before Microsoft purchased the webmail service. Live Documents are flash based office applications that have the ability for collaboration and online and offline syncing in a MS Office based environment. Applications are similar to Microsoft's traditional Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but are built using Flash and Flex so that any user on any system can view and edit at will in a richer multimedia environment. If the web portion doesn't do anything for you, the desktop client might with its offline abilities. It wraps up MS Office through a plug-in and embeds collaboration options into them as well, making it possible for multiple people to edit documents at the same time keeping them secure and allowing for revision controls.

Live Documents is not currently live, but you can request to try out their office solution on their website. We are awaiting an invite, and will report back if it's a worthwhile contender when we actually see it in action.

Tags: applications, office, online, web, web2

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

boogie said 10:23PM on 11-23-2007

Flash-based? Nah, forget it. I don't think that Flash technologies are there yet in terms of bandswitch optimization. So, if I have old skool dial-up(and many people in US still do), how fast will this Live Documents load? Now, how would you deal with growing trend of mobile apps, do you expect flash-based thingy to work on those? Not everyone can afford HTC devices with feature-rich browsers.

ashish said 2:53AM on 11-24-2007

Dial-up? Somehow I doubt that these online document services are geared towards dial-up users. Come on...

Nikhil said 6:29PM on 11-24-2007

awsum!!!1

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