Okay, now here is something I am familiar with. Online productivity tools are largely touted as the end of many software giants, such as Microsoft, model of offering services from one’s desktop. This new model focusses on creating programs or tools that accessed from one’s Internet browser. This means no buying or downloading onto one’s own computer. Nope, access your account or file online and begin working. Of course, this means that you have to have access to a computer with the Internet accessible from it.
There are actually companies that offer a range of online productivity tools for businesses to use without having to purchase or download specific software. I believe the client pays a nominal sum to have this other company store their data or files and to upgrade and improve the services of that productivity tool. No more paying for IT support on staff, yikes!
Anyhoo, the big behemoth that all eyes are on happens to be Google. With their acquisition of Writely and renaming their online productivity service Google Docs they gave Microsoft a rude awakening of what the future might hold. Too bad Microsoft spent so much to get Vista out. Then again most likely, with the fact that online productivity tools being accessible online, the future will likely be a mix of desktop centered and online accessible tools and applications. Nevertheless, the desktop module will definitely not be the only way of looking at things anymore.
With such services available one doesn’t need to worry about upgrades, your computer crashing and losing it, having to store it on some device to transport it and even better, with many of these services you can even share your documents with others such as a group project, research team or a business team. One can upload a document and invite others to work on it. I used Google Docs and Writeboard in school to allow another individual to edit and further develop a story I developed and created a poem, where in true Web 2.0 fashion others could be invited in to make their own contributions to the poem. There are a number of other online productivity tools out there, check out this list I found online.
As I pointed out to a friend, what is great about this for libraries, especially if you get patrons like we do, is that when someone comes in to work on something they don’t have to worry about whether they brought a flash drive or whatever that library allows for storing docs, no, they can simply save it online and access it later if they need to. Further, figure about did they save it in the right file format or type to be opened on our computers just access and open it online and they are ready to go. They can work on it later, invite others, e-mail or even print it out all by simply going online and accessing their saved document.
Well that is it for now.